Category Archives: Korea

Winston Reviews Kim, Democracy After Virtue

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2019.07.20 View this Review Online   View Other NDPR Reviews

Sungmoon Kim, Democracy After Virtue: Toward Pragmatic Confucian Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2018, 255pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780190671235.

Reviewed by Kenneth Winston, Harvard University

As Asian countries reclaim their former prominence on the world stage, many Asian scholars are engaged in an ardent effort to respond to the new reality by reexamining basic political principles. The effort is not only academic or philosophical; it is deeply moral — an effort to preserve what is of value in one’s own culture or tradition while adapting to new geopolitical circumstances and engaging in new relationships. Sungmoon Kim is a member in good standing of an international group of scholars who join this intellectual conversation with the general aim of reconciling Confucianism and democracy — with an agenda and vocabulary taken primarily from contemporary English-language analytic philosophy. While written at a fairly abstract level, this book can be read as a search for identity or self-understanding in an evolving world.

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Book Symposium on Kim, Public Reason Confucianism

The latest issue of the Journal of Social Philosophy includes a Book Symposium on Sungmoon Kim’s Public Reason Confucianism (Cambridge, 2016):

  • Joseph Chan, Public Reason Confucianism Without Foundation?
  • Baldwin Wong, A Non‐Sectarian Comprehensive Confucianism?—On Kim’s Public Reason Confucianism
  • Franz Mang, Why Public Reason Could Not Be Too Modest: The Case of Public Reason Confucianism
  • Stephen C. Angle, Does Confucian Public Reason Depend on Confucian Civil Religion?
  • Sungmoon Kim, In Defense of Public Reason Confucianism: Reply to Chan, Mang, Wong, and Angle

New website for Sungkyun Institute for Confucian Studies and East Asian Philosophy

The new Sungkyun Institute for Confucian Studies and East Asian Philosophy (SICEP) has just launched a preliminary version of its webpage. Modifications and updates will follow. Please visit and see how the institute paves a new path at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) with Philip J. Ivanhoe as its director.

Ivanhoe Moving to SKK University in Korea

Philip J. Ivanhoe, currently Chair Professor of East Asian and Comparative Philosophy and Religion at City University of Hong Kong, has accepted the position of Distinguished Chair Professor in the College of Confucian Studies and Eastern Philosophy at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea. He will assume this post on 15 November 2018. Among Professor Ivanhoe’s duties will be to serve as editor in chief of the Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture at the Institute of Confucian Philosophy and Cultures and director of a new research center within the College of Confucian Studies and Eastern Philosophy tentatively named the Confucian Institute for East Asian Philosophy (CIEAP).