The research of William Gilbert focuses on Korean Daoism, religious syncretism, and comparative philosophy—areas that remain underdeveloped even within the growing field of Korean philosophy. Doctoral Student at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea, he is completing a dissertation on Korean Neo-Daoism in the Goryeo dynasty under the supervision of Professor Halla Kim. In 2024, he became the first Westerner to graduate with an M.A. in Korean philosophy from Sungkyunkwan University. His thesis examined questions of cosmogony in the writings of the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392) poet-philosopher Yi Gyubo through a comparative Daoist lens. He has presented at numerous international conferences across South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Italy, and the United States. Alongside his research, he serves as an editorial assistant on two forthcoming Oxford and Routledge volumes on Korean philosophy, and co-produced several publicly available online courses introducing Korean philosophy to general audiences. His broader aim is to help build the infrastructure this field still lacks, translations, introductory resources, and comparative scholarship that takes Korean philosophy seriously on its own terms.
Could you tell us a bit about your academic trajectory and how you came to specialize in Korean philosophy? What drew you, as a Western scholar, to pursue your studies at Sogang University?
I began my academic career with an undergraduate degree in philosophy from the University of North Florida (UNF). The department there was unusually well-balanced: alongside the Western classics and modern European philosophy, three faculty members specialized in Eastern philosophy, which meant I was introduced to Asian traditions from the start. I quickly gravitated toward Asian philosophy, eventually writing a paper under Professor Sarah Mattice that drew on Korean aesthetics. My decision to pursue Korean philosophy was partly strategic—given the state of the academic job market, I wanted a research niche that would make me stand out—but it was also personal. I am half Korean, and I had grown up largely disconnected from that side of my heritage. Korean philosophy became a way of connecting with roots I had never really had the chance to explore growing up.
When I began applying to graduate programs, I quickly discovered that very few American universities had faculty working in Asian philosophy at all, let alone Korean philosophy specifically. Rather than treating that as a reason for discouragement, I decided to go to the source. A year after graduating, I moved to South Korea to pursue an M.A. at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), despite not knowing any Korean and having never lived abroad before. It was a steep adjustment, linguistically, culturally, and academically, but I was fortunate to develop considerably as a scholar under the guidance of Professor Sojeong Park.
After completing my MA at SKKU, I sought out Professor Halla Kim at Sogang University, who is among the best-known scholars doing Korean philosophy. I am currently the only foreign student in Sogang’s philosophy department, and the only one focusing on Korean philosophy. There is something both ironic and telling in that, given that I am studying a tradition in the country that produced it.
Many canonical philosophical narratives remain centered on European traditions. What conceptual or methodological shifts are required to take Korean philosophy seriously as part of global philosophy, rather than as a peripheral addition?
For several decades now, the field of philosophy has been slowly expanding to admit Chinese and Indian philosophy as legitimate areas of philosophical inquiry rather than mere cultural curiosity. Korean philosophy has begun to benefit from this shift, but it also faces a particular challenge: because it developed largely within the Chinese philosophical traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, it could be treated as derivative, a regional variation of Chinese thought rather than a tradition in its own right. One of the ongoing tasks for scholars in this field is to acknowledge that profound debt to China while also demonstrating where Korean thinkers departed from, extended, or re-framed those inherited frameworks in genuinely original ways. This is a problem that I will be addressing in my dissertation on the emergence of “Korean” Neo-Daoism.
The more fundamental methodological shift required, though, is a willingness to stop treating Western philosophy as the implicit standard against which all other traditions are measured. Korean philosophy does not always ask the same questions in the same ways, and that is not a deficiency. The Korean emphasis on moral emotions, for instance, or the deep investment in questions of self-cultivation and practice, reflects a different set of priorities, not an incomplete version of what Kant or Aristotle were doing. Taking Korean philosophy seriously means engaging its own questions on their own terms first, before asking how they map into Western categories.
There are also practical and institutional shifts required: more translations of primary texts, more introductory scholarly resources, and more willingness among philosophy departments (even in Korea) to include non-Western traditions in core curricula rather than treating them as optional supplements. Korean philosophy in particular suffers from a lack of accessible entry points for students and scholars who are curious but do not yet have the linguistic training to work with original sources.
As the first Westerner to graduate from Sungkyunkwan University in this field, you occupy a unique position between intellectual traditions. What challenges and opportunities have you encountered while studying and interpreting Korean philosophy from this “in-between” perspective?
I was the first Westerner to graduate with an M.A. in the Korean philosophy major from SKKU. It is a distinction I am proud of, but it came with real difficulties. The most immediate was language. My coursework was conducted primarily in Korean, which I had not studied before arriving. What I had not anticipated was the additional layer of classical Chinese: virtually all Korean philosophical writing prior to the modern era was composed in classical Chinese characters (Hanja), since Hangeul, the Korean alphabet invented in the fifteenth century, was not widely adopted for scholarly writing until centuries later. Becoming a competent researcher in this field requires working across modern Korean and classical Chinese, a formidable linguistic undertaking.
The social dimension was also challenging. Being the only Westerner in my program meant there were few natural points of connection with my peers, most of whom were more obviously comfortable in Korean than in English and understandably hesitant to switch languages. The isolation was real, and it took time to find ways around it. What that experience taught me was that I am the one who needs to be proactive in seeking out relationships. One can also find friendships outside of school, for example, at a local gym or a language exchange group.
On the opportunity side, in the words of my supervisor, Korean philosophy remains a blue ocean. There is still no comprehensive sourcebook in Korean philosophy, little strong introductory literature suitable for undergraduates, and a substantial body of primary texts still awaiting translation. For a scholar willing to do the groundwork, there is no shortage of meaningful work to be done, which is not always the case in fields where the major texts have been analyzed exhaustively for centuries.
Korean philosophy has developed through complex interactions with Confucianism, Buddhism, and indigenous traditions. How do these interactions shape its conceptual landscape, and what kinds of philosophical questions emerge from this plurality?
One of the things that drew me most to Korean philosophy is precisely this quality of synthesis. Rather than treating Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism as competing systems to be resolved or ranked, some Korean thinkers have historically engaged with all three simultaneously, and often with indigenous traditions like Shamanism acting as a cultural undercurrent. The result is a philosophical tradition that is less concerned with drawing sharp boundaries between schools than with asking how different frameworks can be brought into productive dialogue.
This tendency toward synthesis shapes the kinds of questions Korean philosophy finds most pressing. Rather than treating Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist concerns as isolated, Korean thinkers often explored how these traditions might be brought into dialogue without collapsing their differences. Choe Chiwon’s account of pungnyu in the late Silla dynasty (57 BCE – 935 CE) is an early example of this impulse. In describing Korea’s indigenous “subtle way” as one that encompassed the ethical teachings of Confucianism, the contemplative insights of Buddhism, and the naturalism of Daoism, Choe articulated a vision of philosophical pluralism in which truth was not confined to a single doctrinal system. This raised enduring philosophical questions about how multiple paths of self-cultivation and value could coexist, complement one another, and together shape an integrated vision of human flourishing. That willingness to seek harmony across traditions without erasing difference became one of the defining features of Korean philosophy and religion.
In the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910), Neo-Confucianism became the dominant framework, but it selectively absorbed rather than totally erased the earlier Buddhist and Daoist currents. This is where some of the most distinctly Korean debates emerge. The Four-Seven Debate, the exchange between Yi Hwang (Toegye) and Ki Daeseung over the relationship between the Four Beginnings described by Mencius and the Seven Emotions of the ritual texts, is a prime example. On its surface, it appears to be a technical dispute about Neo-Confucian metaphysics. But at stake is something more fundamental: can the emotions be trusted as reliable guides to moral action, or must they be subordinated to principle(Li)? These questions resonate directly with contemporary debates in moral psychology and virtue ethics.
What I find philosophically generative about this pluralism is that it resists easy resolution. Korean philosophy does not offer a single unified system. It offers a tradition of thinkers in constant negotiation between frameworks, which means the questions remain genuinely open. That openness, rather than being a weakness, is one of its most unique characteristics.
In discussions of underrepresented traditions, there is often a tension between historical reconstruction and contemporary philosophical relevance. How do you see Korean philosophy contributing to current philosophical debates?
This tension is something I think about seriously, and I do not think it has a clean resolution. There is a real risk in relevance-washing, forcing historical texts to speak to contemporary problems in ways that distort both the tradition and the problem. At the same time, a Korean philosophy that exists purely as historical reconstruction, sealed off from the concerns of living people, seems diminished in a different way.
My view is that the best comparative contributions come when Korean philosophical texts are engaged on their own terms first, when we take seriously the questions they were actually trying to answer, and then ask what those answers might genuinely offer to contemporary debates. This is different from simply mining ancient texts for passages that sound useful when quoted out of context.
The Four-Seven Debate I mentioned earlier is a good example. It is a debate about the moral status of feeling: do emotions track moral reality reliably, or are they too easily distorted by circumstance and self-interest? Contemporary moral psychology and meta-ethics are deeply invested in exactly these questions, debates about whether moral intuitions are reliable, whether emotion and reason are separable in moral judgment, and what role affect plays in motivation. Korean Neo-Confucian thinkers have carefully worked-out positions on these questions that deserve a place in that conversation, not as historical footnotes but as genuine philosophical interlocutors.
Korean Buddhist philosophy also has contributions to make, particularly in discussions of mind and interdependence that bear on contemporary philosophy of mind and environmental ethics. The concept of interpenetration developed within the Huayan tradition, elaborated with particular sophistication by the Korean monk Uisang, offers a framework for thinking about the relationship between individual and whole that differs substantially from the individualist assumptions embedded in some Western philosophy.
While Korean philosophy scholarship in Korea has produced exceptional historical and textual work, there has been comparatively less emphasis in modern times on drawing explicit connections to contemporary philosophical debates. One contribution I hope to make is to help build those bridges while preserving the historical integrity of the traditions involved.
How does your experience working within a Korean academic and cultural context shape the kinds of philosophical questions you find meaningful or urgent? In what ways does philosophizing in Korea differ from philosophizing in Western institutional settings?
Being immersed in this context has sharpened my sense of what the field values and where its boundaries lie. “Korean philosophy” departments, at least the one I was a part of, are overwhelmingly oriented toward Joseon dynasty Neo-Confucianism. That focus produces extraordinarily deep scholarship on a relatively narrow range of historical figures, texts, and problems, but it also means that questions outside that orbit can feel marginal or unwelcome.
What strikes me most about the difference between philosophizing here and in Western institutional settings is the relationship to contemporary relevance. Most Western philosophy departments, whatever their orientation, feel some pressure to engage with questions that matter now: AI ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of race, climate ethics. From what I have observed, Korean philosophy as practiced in Korean universities remains almost entirely anchored in the past. The questions are often drawn from debates that are centuries old, and there is little appetite for asking what those debates might have to say about the present. Whether that is a strength or a limitation probably depends on what you think philosophy is for.
The Reports from Abroad series is deeply interested in the idea that philosophy is always done “from somewhere.” From your perspective, what does it mean to philosophize “from abroad”? And how has your engagement with Korean philosophy transformed your understanding of philosophy as a whole?
Philosophizing abroad, in the sense that matters to me, is not a matter of geographic displacement. It is about the particular kind of estrangement that comes from trying to think seriously within a tradition that was not built for you, and discovering, in the process, that some of what you took to be universal was actually local.
My situation is an unusual one. I am half Korean, which means Korea is not entirely foreign to me in any simple sense. But I grew up in the United States, trained in mostly Western philosophy, and arrived in Korea knowing almost nothing about the culture or language. What I found, as I worked through classical Korean texts, was not confirmation of ideas I already held, but a genuinely different set of assumptions about what philosophy is supposed to do. The emphasis on practice over theory, on moral self-cultivation as an ongoing and embodied process rather than an intellectual exercise, on the relationship between emotions and ethical life—these were not just different answers to familiar questions. They suggested that some of the questions I had taken for granted were not as foundational as I had assumed.
That experience has made me more skeptical of blanket philosophical universalism, not because I think there are no universal truths, but because I am more attentive now to how quickly the local gets mistaken for the universal. A philosophical tradition that has been dominant long enough begins to look like philosophy itself, and everything else looks like regional variation. One of the things that studying Korean philosophy from the inside has given me is a clearer sense of where those optical illusions occur.
William Gilbert
William Gilbert is a philosophy PhD student at Sogang University researching Korean Daoism, Yi Gyubo, and religious syncretism. His dissertation traces the emergence of Korean Daoism and its early integration into Korean thought. He has presented at conferences across Asia, Europe, and the United States and previously co-produced online courses introducing Korean philosophy to global audiences.
André M. Penna-Firme is the Editor of the Reports from Abroad series. He is a teacher, poet and PhD candidate in Philosophy and Aesthetics at PUC-Rio, with a master’s degree in philosophy with an emphasis on Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art from both PUC-Rio and Université Paris 8. His research covers topics such as literary reception, intellectual history, history of concepts, literature, always at the intersection of three axes: History, Literature and Philosophy. He currently investigates the poetic and theatrical nature of philosophical thinking in authors such as Nietzsche, Diderot, and others.
