Abstract

Transnational Interactions: Korea’s Religious and Philosophical Traditions
Throughout history Korean scholars have been extremely important in East Asia, often importing and refining ideas from China, before exporting them to Japan. However, the West is still largely unaware of Korea’s intellectual significance within East Asia. This paper will attempt in some small way to redress this matter. It provides an overview of Korea’s pre-modern intellectual history, and highlights some of Korea’s contributions to East Asian thought that have impacted traditions and ideas in China and Japan. It also looks at how Western ideas and Korean scholars interacted, and it presents some of the first European accounts of Korea from the sixteenth century, including Hendrick Hamel’s, as well as Charles Dallet’s more in-depth account from his book Histoire de l’Église de Corée (1874). In a time of great change from the start if the nineteenth century, it also highlights a group of notable Confucian scholars who engaged with Western ideas at a deeply intellectual level; some of them went on to convert to Catholicism and found their own Church, laying a solid foundation for the Protestant missionaries who would arrive later.

Bio note

Dr Kevin Cawley is a Senior Lecturer in Korean Studies and Director of the Irish Institute of Korean Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. He engages with contemporary critical theory to investigate the intellectual history of Korea, encompassing both philosophical and religious traditions. Additionally, he is interested in acculturation between traditions, such as Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism, and between Catholicism and Neo-Confucianism in the late 18th/early 19th century. He has published extensively on various aspects of Korea’s intellectual traditions. His books include Religious and Philosophical Traditions of Korea (Routledge: 2019) and Transnational East Asian Studies with Julia Schneider (Liverpool University Press: 2023).