![]() |
‘The Body and Philosophy’
Speaker: Mark Johnson
Prof. Johnson will answer the question; “Why the body matters in philosophy?” His speech will feature the meaning of our bodies and help expand our view on the nature of human understanding and philosophy.
Mark Johnson is a knight professor of liberal arts and sciences in the department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. His research has focused on the philosophical implications of the role of human embodiment in meaning, conceptualization, reasoning, and values. He is co-author, with George Lakoff, of Metaphors We Live By (1980) and Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) and author of The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (1987), Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (1993), and The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (2007). He has published numerous articles and book chapters on topics in philosophy of art and aesthetics, cognitive science, philosophy of language, philosophical psychology, moral theory, and Kant studies. He is currently working on the aesthetic dimensions of human meaning-making and on the emergence of values from our bodily and interpersonal experience.
Moderator: Kwon Teck-young (Professor of English Literature, Kyung Hee University)
Discussant: Oh Chong-hwan (Professor of Aesthetics, Seoul National University)
Chun Choong-hwan (Professor of Liberal Arts, Kyung Hee University)
Date/Venue 4 (Thursday) November 2010, 13:00~14:30 / B117, Cheongwoongwan

Speaker: Tu Weiming
Weiming believes the disciplining of the body is an educational goal throughout human history. He will touch on different ways to discipline the body from the most extreme form of asceticism to the least interventionist persuasion. He says the body is constantly being taught to behave in a certain way acceptable to societal norms, and cultures in general and spiritual traditions in particular have their methods to deal with the body.
Tu Weiming is an ethicist and a New Confucian. He is currently Harvard-Yenching professor of Chinese history and philosophy and of Confucian studies in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He was director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute (1996-2008) and director of the institute of culture and communication at the East-West Center in Hawaii (1990-1991). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Tu was born in Kunming, Yunnan Province, Mainland China in 1940. He obtained his B.A. (1961) in Chinese Studies at Tunghai University in Taiwan and earned his M.A. (1963) in regional studies (East Asia) and Ph.D. (1968) in history and East Asian languages at Harvard University. Tu taught at Princeton University (1968-1971) and the University of California, Berkeley (1971-1981) and has been on the Harvard faculty since 1981.
Moderator: Kim Sang-jun (Professor of the Graduate School of NGO Studies, Kyung Hee University)
Discussant: Kim Su-jung (Professor of Philosophy, Kyung Hee University)
Chung In-chai (Professor Emeritus of Eastern Philosophy, Sogang University)
Date/Venue 4 (Thursday) November 2010, 14:40~16:10 / B117, Cheongwoongwan

Speaker: Richard Shusterman
Shusterman focuses on the somatic style in the transmission of philosophical ideas, and in the expression and development of ethical character. His paper examines five logical ambiguities that inhabit and complicate the notion of style in general but also somatic style in particular, before proceeding to examine ways that the body’s various elements contribute to the construction of somatic style. He will also outline the different ways that our multiple somatic senses perceive and critically appreciate somatic style. He concludes by examining the connection of style and spirit.
Richard Shusterman is an American pragmatist philosopher, currently the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University. Richard Shusterman received a B.A. in Philosophy and English and an M.A. in Philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After three years as an officer in the Israeli army, he continued his academic studies in England, receiving his doctorate in Philosophy from St. John’s College, Oxford University. He is internationally known for his contributions to philosophical aesthetics.
Moderator: Shin Eun-hee (Professor of Liberal Arts, Kyung Hee University)
Discussant: Kim Jin-yup Kim (Professor of Aesthetics, Seoul National University)
Lee Young-lan (Professor of Arts & Design, Kyung Hee University)
Date/Venue 4 (Thursday) November 2010, 16:20~17:50 / B117, Cheongwoongwan

According to Ray Kurzweil, we could use our enormous computing power to model the brain’s DNA and then use that model DNA to grow an artificial brain. However, Hubert Dreyfus, an existential philosopher, suggests that we should give up this desperate attempt to achieve immortality by digitalizing our bodies and, instead, face up to our mortality.
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (born October 15, 1929 in Terre Haute, Indiana to Stanley S. and Irene Lederer Dreyfus), is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Dreyfus was educated at Harvard, earning three degrees there (B.A in 1951, M.A in 1952, and Ph.D. in 1964). His main interests include phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. While spending most of his teaching career at Berkeley, Professor Dreyfus has also taught at the Brandeis University (1957 to 1959), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (from 1960 to 1968), the University of Frankfurt, and Hamilton College. His philosophical work has influenced Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, John Searle, and his former student John Haugeland, among others. His book What Computers Still Can’t Do has been translated into 11 languages including Korean.
Moderator: Khang Gon (Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Kyung Hee University)
Discussant: Nam Soon-gun (Professor of Physics, Kyung Hee University)
Shin Sang-kyu (Professor of Philosophy, Ewha Institute for the Humanities)
Date/Venue 5 (Friday) November 2010, 10:30~12:00 / B117, Cheongwoongwan

Speaker: Anne Harrington
Harrington will deal with embodied existence and coexistence under the titled of “Culture and the Body: Insights from the History of Mind-Body Medicine” She argues there are potentially profound lessons to be learned from such “misbehaving bodies” for both scholars of culture (especially anthropologists and historians) and researchers of biomedicine and biology, looking at examples from the history of hypnosis, hysteria, stress, and the placebo effect.
Anne Harrington is Harvard College professor and professor for the history of science, specializing in the history of psychiatry, neuroscience, and the other mind and behavioral sciences. She co-directed Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative. She was also a consultant for the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Mind-Body Interactions. Currently she serves on the Board of the Mind and Life Institute, an organization dedicated to cross-cultural dialogue between Buddhism and the science.
She is also the co-editor of Biosocieties, a journal concerned with social science approaches to the life sciences.
Moderator: Jeong Seo-young (Professor of Pharmacy, Kyung Hee University)
Discussant: Kang Shin-ik (Professor of Medical Humanities, In Je University) Cha Woong-seok (Professor of Oriental Medicine, Kyung Hee University)
Date/Venue 5 (Friday) November 2010, 13:30~15:00 / B117, Cheongwoongwan