The K-Future Team of the Center for Contemporary Korean Studies invites you to a colloquium with Professor Tong Shijun, President of NYU Shanghai.

• Title: Dialogue Between Eastern and Western Civilizations through Habermas’s 2019 Study on Confucianism

• Speaker: Prof. Tong Shijun (President, NYU Shanghai)

• Discussants: Prof. Sang-Jin Han (Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Seoul National University), Prof. Kyung-Rok Kwon (Assistant Professor of Korean Literature, National Chengchi University, Taiwan)

• Moderator: Prof. Jaeho Kang (Professor of Communication, Seoul National University)

• Date & Time: Wednesday, July 16, 2025, 4:00–6:00 PM

• Venue: Room 501, IBK Communication Center (Bldg. 64), Seoul National University

• Language: English

Speaker Bio:
Prof. Tong Shijun is one of China’s leading scholars of reading Jürgen Habermas. He translated Habermas’s seminal work Faktizität und Geltung (Between Facts and Norms) into Chinese. Born in Shanghai in 1958, he now serves as President of NYU Shanghai and has been active at the forefront of cultural exchange between East and West. While Habermas has consistently defended the universalist orientation of the “unfinished project of modernity,” Tong has sought to reinterpret this project in East Asia’s historical and cultural context, exploring the possibility of an “East Asian modernity.” His representative works include “Habermas and the Discourse of Modernity in China” and “Chinese Thought and Dialogical Universalism.”

Abstract:

Lecture Overview:

Although Confucianism is featured as one of the Axial traditions in Jürgen Habermas’s Also a History of Philosophy (2019), its status as a worldview grounded in “immanent transcendence” has yet to be fully explicated. Achieving such an understanding requires not only a deeper grasp of the diverse schools and historical layers within Confucianism, but also a deeply embedded participant perspective.

This colloquium centered on a lecture by Tong Shijun, Chancellor of NYU Shanghai, and explored the possibilities for East–West civilizational dialogue through Habermas’s interpretation of Confucianism. Chancellor Tong reinterpreted Confucianism as both a worldview of immanent transcendence and a “learned religion” grounded in education and self-cultivation. He emphasized the significance of a meta-virtue—the love of learning—within East Asian political philosophy.

Key themes included the institutionalization of reflexive learning capacities, critiques of instrumental rationality and meritocracy, and the complex relationship between learning and power. In the ensuing discussion, Professor Sang-Jin Han (Emeritus, Department of Sociology, Seoul National University) connected these theoretical insights to recent political experiences in South Korea, raising the question of how Habermasian and Confucian thought might converge in the practical spheres of democracy—namely, the street and the public sphere.

Overall, the event served as a platform to reexamine Confucianism as a contemporary resource for East Asian political philosophy, and to reflect on the intertwined relationships among learning, democracy, and public discourse in the region.

Contact:
Yong-rae Jung, Research Assistant
📧 jyongr422@snu.ac.kr