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:
Although Confucianism is discussed in Habermas’s Also a History of Philosophy (2019) as one of the Axial traditions, its status as a worldview of “immanent transcendence” has not been sufficiently explicated. To do so requires not only deeper knowledge of different sub-schools and successive generations of Confucianism, but also a firmly grounded participant perspective.
We warmly welcome the participation of all interested colleagues.

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