Organizer

So-Jeong Park,
​Sungkyunkwan University

PARK, So Jeong is associate professor of Korean Philosophy at the College of Confucian Studies and Eastern Philosophy at Sungkyunkwan University where she is also director of Institute of Korean Philosophy and Culture and director of K-Academic Expansion Center. Her research focus ranges from Korean philosophy and comparative philosophy to philosophy of music. She has published widely and developed online courses on "Introduction to Korean Philosophy and Culture” and “In Search for the Origins of Korean Philosophy” on Coursera.

Co-Organizer

Youngsun Back,
Sungkyunkwan University

Youngsun Back is an Associate Professor in the College of Confucian Studies and Eastern Philosophy at Sungkyunkwan University. Back specializes in East Asian philosophy. Her publications include: “Yi Ik on Compassion and Grief,” “Confucian Virtue Politics,” “Who should Ascend the Throne?” “Rethinking Mozi’s Jian’ai,” She is also co-editor of Traditional Korean Philosophy: Problems and Debates (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016).

Participants

Zhuangzi Reading Wordshop Session - The Huang Lao Chapters in the Zhuangzi


​[Day1]
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Chris Fraser,
​University of Toronto

Chris Fraser holds the Richard Charles and Esther Yewpick Lee Chair in Chinese Thought and Culture, a joint appointment in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of East Asian Studies. His research specialization is classical Chinese philosophy, particularly how early Chinese theories of mind, knowledge, and language intersect with issues in contemporary epistemology, action theory, and ethics. He also works on the history of Chinese political thought, especially the development of the concept of standards or laws and the interplay between moral character and social institutions. His recent books include Late Classical Chinese Thought (Oxford, forthcoming), The Essential Mozi (Oxford, 2020), and The Philosophy of the Mozi (Columbia, 2016). He is also currently working on both a monograph and a translation of the Daoist classic Zhuangzi.

Mark Csikszentmihalyi,
​UC Berkeley

Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Marjorie Meyer Eliaser Chair of International Studies, has an AB in East Asian Languages and Civilizations (Harvard) and a Ph.D. in Asian Languages (Stanford). He is the director of the Group in the Study of Religion at the University of California at Berkeley. He uses both excavated and transmitted texts to reconstruct the religions, philosophies, and cultures of early China. Recent books include Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China (2004) and Readings in Han Chinese Thought (2006). He is currently translating a set of Song dynasty essays on the Zhuangzi. He is Editor of the Early China

Tobias Zürn,
​Reed College​

Tobias Benedikt Zürn is holds the Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion and Humanities. Tobias Benedikt Zürn is a historian of religion who explores various forms and practices of embodiment, powerful texts, and ritual theory in early and medieval Daoism and Buddhism. He engages in the multidisciplinary and multimedia reception history of “Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream,” one of the most influential vignettes in East Asian religious and cultural history. He is also the co-founder of the international research project “Global Reception of the Classic Zhuangzi” and the “Global Daoist Studies Forum,” a virtual venue that seeks to promote the study of Daoism and foster the global community of scholars in Daoist studies.
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Brook Ziporyn,
​University of Chicago​

Brook A. Ziporyn is a scholar of ancient and medieval Chinese religion and philosophy. He is currently working on a cross-cultural inquiry into the themes of death, time and perception, tentatively entitled Against Being Here Now, as well as a book-length exposition of atheism as a form of religious and mystical experience in the intellectual histories of Europe, India and China. Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings, translated and with introduction and notes by Brook Ziporyn was published by Hackett in 2020, and his translation of the Daodejing was published by Liveright Books and the Norton Library in 2022. 
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[Day2]
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Erica Brindley,
​Pennsylvania State University​

Erica  Brindley is Professor  of Asian Studies, History, and Philosophy in Pennsylvania State University. She is an  intellectual and cultural historian of early China (500 BC to 200 CE) interested in the development of premodern East Asia, especially a region she calls SEAMZ (the Southeast Asian Maritime Zone). Her first three books concern ancient Chinese thought and intellectual history. They are titled Individualism  in Early China: Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics (University of Hawaii Press, 2010); Music,  Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China (State  University of New York Press, 2012); and Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c.400 BCE – 50 CE (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She has also edited or co-edited four more special journal volumes and is the series co-editor (with Rowan Flad) of Cambridge Elements: Ancient East Asia. A current book project involves rethinking the sociology of the later Mohist groups in early Chinese intellectual history. 

Wim de Reu,
​National Taiwan University

Wim De Reu is associate professor of Philosophy at National Taiwan University. His interests include early Chinese views on language and human interaction, the theory and practice of argumentation, and cognitive linguistics. He has published articles on paradox and other forms of argument in early China, the role of metaphors in the construction of early Chinese philosophy, the relation between coexistence and (non-)verbal interaction in the Zhuangzi, and the structure and argumentation of later Zhuangzi chapters. 

Scott Cook,
​Yale-NUS College

Scott Cook(顧史考) is Tan Chin Tuan Professor of Chinese Studies at Yale-NUS College. He specialises in pre-imperial manuscript studies and early Chinese intellectual history. He is author of The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation, vols. 1-2 (Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 2012), The Pre-Imperial Confucian Texts of Guodian: Broad and Focused Perspectives 郭店楚簡先秦儒書宏微觀 (Taipei: Xuesheng shuju, 2006), A Multi-Perspective Survey of Lost Warring States Texts among the Shanghai-Museum and Other Chu Manuscripts 上博等楚簡戰國逸書縱橫覽 (Shanghai: Zhongxi shuju, 2018), A Study of Recorded Conversations of Confucius Texts among the Shanghai Museum Manuscripts上博竹書孔子語錄文獻研究 (Shanghai: Zhongxi shuju, 2021), editor of Hiding the World in the World: Uneven Discourses on the Zhuangzi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), and the author of over seventy-five articles in both English and Chinese.​


[Day3]
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Esther S. Klein,
​Australian National University

Esther Sunkyung Klein is a senior lecturer in Australian National University(PhD Princeton, East Asian Studies). She researches pre-modern Chinese historiography, philosophy, and literature. Her monograph Reading Sima Qian from Han to Song: the Father of History in Pre-modern China was published in 2019. She has also published on the authorship of the Zhuangzi, Wang Chong’s epistemology, and other issues relating to the history and transmission of ideas. Her current project focuses on approaches to truth and evidence in premodern China, including both the philosophical and historiographical traditions. Issues include methods for critical evaluation of evidence, approaches to contradiction and disagreement, and issues of bias and subjectivity in the representation of ‘truths’.​

Sonya Özbey,
​University of Michigan

Sonya is Assistant Professor of Chinese Philosophy at the University of Michigan. She is a scholar of classical Chinese philosophy and early modern European philosophy. Thematically, her research focuses on conceptions of human and animal identity, as well as intersections of categories of animality, gender, and ethnicity, in different philosophical texts. Sonya is particularly interested in examining the grammar of different types of reasoning that establishes humans as exceptional, if not superior, and how different formulations of human exceptionality inform conceptualizations of differences within human communities. Owing to the fact that her research draws from different philosophical traditions, Sonya is also interested in methodologies of intercultural philosophy.

Franklin Perkins,
​University of Hawai’i at Mānoa

Franklin Perkins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and editor of the journal Philosophy East and West. His main research interests are in classical Chinese philosophy, early modern European philosophy, and in the challenges of doing philosophy in a comparative or  intercultural context. He is the author of Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge, 2004), Leibniz: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2007), Heaven and Earth are not Humane: The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy (Indiana, 2014), and was co-editor of Chinese Metaphysics and Its Problems (Cambridge, 2015). His most recent book is Doing What You Really Want: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mengzi (Oxford University Press, 2021). His books have been translated into Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese.


​
General Commentator​​

Hans-Georg Moeller,
​University of Macau

Hans-Georg Moeller is professor of Philosophy at the University of Macau. His research focuses on Chinese and Comparative Philosophy (specifically Daoism) and on Social and Political Thought (specifically Social Systems Theory). He is the co-author of Genuine Pretending: On the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi(2017, Columbia University Press, With Paul D’Ambrosio), and the author of The Radical Luhmann(2011, Columbia University Press), The Moral Fool. A Case for Amorality(2009, Columbia University Press), Daodejing(Laozi). A Complete Translation and Commentary(2007, Open Court), Luhmann Explained. From Souls to Systems(2006, Open Court),The Philosophy of the Daodejing(2006, Columbia University Press), and Daoism Explained. From the Dream of the Butterfly to the Fishnet Allegory(2004, Open Court). His books have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, and Italian. He was awarded 2018 Dao Annual Best Essay Award (issued by Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy) for paper on “Incongruent Names: A Theme in the History of Chinese Philosophy,” co-published with Paul D’Ambrosio and Hans-Rudolf Kantor.

Graduate Students

Graduate Students Session - Reading Zhuangzi through Yi Gyubo

Will Gilbert ([email protected])

 I’m an MA student in the Korean Philosophy department of Sungkyunkwan University. I also work as a research assistant for the Korean Academic Expansion Project (KAEP) under Professor So-Jeong Park. My research interests are Korean aesthetics and Korean Daoism. As the only student of Western origin in the department, my goal is to help spread awareness and understanding of Korean philosophy to a global audience.​

Sejin Oh ([email protected])

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Korean Philosophy at the College of Confucian Studies and Eastern Philosophy at Sungkyunkwan University. My research interests lie in the philosophical traditions of the Korean peninsula during the 16th to 20th centuries. Specifically, I am exploring the relationship between Neo-Confucianism, Western Learning, and Practical Learning during that period. My ultimate aim is to contribute to the mapping of the intellectual topography of the Korean peninsula.

​Jae-Yul Lee

I am a Ph.D. student in Korean Philosophy at the College of Confucian Studies and Eastern Philosophy at Sungkyunkwan University. My research interests include the Daoist Philosophy of Laozi and Zhangzi. I am especially interested in the concepts of Laozi's non-being(無), and Zhangzi's useless(無用).​

Song-Hee Han ([email protected])

I am a PhD student at Sungkyunkwan University interested in the modernization of Korea's traditional philosophy. Especially, I wonder how modern political philosophy can be developed with the utilization of Korean thoughts. My M.A.'s dissertation is about the Korean modern religious thinker Ham Seok-heon(1901-1989) based on the philosophy of education. My current interest is how the scholars in late 18th~ Early 19th faced the turbulent era through traditional and new ideas. Also, I am interested in early thought in Korea which are not yet discovered.​

Yeong-Chae Yun ([email protected])

I am a MA student majoring Korean philosophy at the College of Confucian Studies and Eastern Philosophy at Sungkyunkwan University. I received a B.A. in Confucian Studies and Eastern Philosophy from the Sungkyunkwan University in 2023. During my undergraduate period, I was interested in the “human relationship” of the Analects. Currently, I am interested in a wide range of topics, including Neo-Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism.

Jeong-in Lee ([email protected])

I am a PhD student whose dissertation topic is Confucianism and Ethics. I received my B.A. in Confucian Studies and Eastern Philosophy from the Sungkyunkwan University in 2020, and I had M.A. also from SKKU in 2022 with a dissertation study on “Friendship” as a mechanism of moral extension in Early Confucianism. Currently, my research interest is political generosity, especially amnesty, and moral reform in terms of Confucian political thought. (Field of Study: Early Chinese Confucianism)