Modern schooling in Korea, which was officially established by law in 1949, is well known for its function as an engine of economic success in modern Korea. Although this fact seems to be world-wid...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art as a Political Act:Expression of Cultural Identity, Self-Identity, and Gender by Suk Nam Yun and Yong Soon MinHwa Young Choi Caruso (bio)IntroductionA number of artists of color, including Asian American women, are creating art from the basis of their lived experiences. Within minority groups searching for their cultural identity, establishing self-identity is an important process. For various psychological and sociological reasons, artists seem inspired to seek deeper meaning (...) and a broader participation in cultural work.1 Asian American women artists, in particular, are currently making art as a means of exploring self-identity, cultural identity, and gender issues. Korean/Korean American minority women artists are creating art as a reaction to their cultural upbringing, which questions issues of identity, gender, ethnicity, politics, cultural, and socioeconomic status. These contemporary artists are breaking away from traditional cultural expectations and overcoming social barriers as artists, women, and Koreans/Korean Americans. With the growing public awareness of women's consciousness and sense of self as women in Korea and as an ethnic minority in America, these artists are redefining their identity. Despite the traditional patriarchal Confucian hierarchy; lack of social, institutional, and political support; and stereotypic gender, cultural, and socioeconomic status expectations for women, a few have stepped out of their traditional roles as women and have become successful artists in Korea and America.The artworks of these artists are worthy of investigation because they appear to be a culturally, socially, and politically motivated artistic expression of the complex multifaceted Korean/Korean American life experiences as women and as Korean immigrant members of a cultural (ethnic) minority in American society. Therefore, two main research questions can be posed: [End Page 71]• Given that art can be constructed out of layers of different experiences and influences, to what extent do the dimensions of cultural identity, self-identity, and gender interweave and contribute to the function of art as a political act for Korean/Korean American women artists?• How do Korean/Korean American cultural, social, and female experiences influence the artistic expression of Korean/Korean American women artists?In order to answer these questions, I selected case study methodology2 and adapted elements of interpretive biography,3 and narrative approaches as developed by Wallace and Gruber.4 According to Denzin,5 interpretive biography involves the collection and analysis of personal experiences, life documents, stories, accounts, and narratives that describe turning-point moments in individuals' lives. Denzin argues that personal experiences and personal stories are derived from a larger cultural, ideological, and historical context. The intent of the biographical project is to problematize the social, economic, cultural, structural, and historical forces that shape, distort, and otherwise alter lived experiences.By using narrative case study methods, I explore elements of self-identity formation, cultural identity, gender issues, personal thoughts, artistic expression, meaning of artworks, professional achievement, and life circumstances. I examine each participant's life in the Korean and American historical, cultural, social, and political environments. I interpret participants' outer lives (what they do) and inner lives (feelings, thoughts, inner self) to capture their deep, profound life experiences. I examine salient themes of their art expression and how the role of art and artistic activity is a part of political, cultural, social, and feminist activism. I further investigate their professional activities in order to identify the multiple roles that contribute to personal and professional identity formation.For the purpose of this study, I selected the contemporary Korean woman artist Suk Nam Yun and the contemporary Korean American woman artist Yong Soon Min as primary participants. These two women artists, despite many social and cultural barriers, chose to become artists; feminists; and social, cultural, and political activists; in addition to fulfilling traditional Korean family and domestic roles. Yun and Min are regarded as the leading contemporary Korean/Korean American women artists whose artworks deal with issues of cultural, social, feminist, political, and hybrid identity and art as political activism.Lippard acknowledges that visual images play an increasingly important role in society.6 Art that connects everyday experience with social critique and creative expression becomes a vital means of reflecting upon the nature of society and social existence.7 Artworks can function as... (shrink)

This essay introduces two Korean women Confucian philosophers: Im Yun- jidang and Gang Jeongildang who lived in the latter period of the Joseon dynasty. Im Yunjidang was the first Confucian woman to explicitly claim women possessed an equal capacity to become sages as men. Gang Jeong- ildang made it clear that she was inspired by and sought to develop the thought of Im and added her own unique insights and new perspectives. Though they and their writings differ in many ways, (...) these two women philosophers created a lineage of female sages, marking a turning point in the history of Confucian philosophy. This paper aims to provide the his- torical background that shaped their thought and to introduce some of their writings in the hope of inspiring readers to study further the lives and philosophies of these two remarkable women and to take up and extend the insights they have left behind. (shrink)

Comparative Political Theory and Cross-Cultural Philosophy explores new forms of philosophizing in the age of globalization by challenging the conventional border between the East and the West, as well as the traditional boundaries among different academic disciplines. This rich investigation demonstrates the importance of cross-cultural thinking in our reading of philosophical texts and explores how cross-cultural thinking transforms our understanding of the traditional philosophical paradigm.

During the Asian and Pacific War, the Japanese government mobilized approximately 200,000 Asian women to military brothels to sexually serve Japanese soldiers. The majority of these victims were unmarried young women from Korea, Japan’s colony at that time. In the early 1990s, Korean feminist leaders helped more than 200 Korean survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery to come forward to tell the truth, which has further accelerated the redress movement for the women. One major issue in the redress movement and (...) research relating to the so-called “comfort women” issue is whether Japan’s colonization of Korea or gender hierarchy was a more fundamental cause of the Korean women’s suffering. Using an intersectional perspective, this article analyzes how colonial power, gender hierarchy, and class were inseparably tied together to make the victims’ lives miserable. By doing so, it shows that a one-sided emphasis on colonization or gender hierarchy will misrepresent the feminist political issue and misinterpret the “comfort women’s” experiences. (shrink)

Transversality is the keyword that permeates the spirit of these thirteen essays spanning almost half a century, from 1965 to 2009.

This paper discusses the educational significance of the national museum as a reminder of the nature of home and its relation to nostalgia. I contextualise the sense of home in various ways. First, the national museum materialises the nostalgic claim of ‘our’ history, the collective memory and identity, which is in some way or other mixed up with the personal memory. Second, it problematises the relation to home. Barbara Cassin’s question, ‘when are we ever at home?’, subtitle to her book (...) Nostalgia, expresses a puzzle that may be apparent both to those who have never left home and to those who have to leave their home for personal, social, or political reasons. In the light of Cassin’s book, the national museum comes to be seen in a contradictory way: it provides the ground and materialisation for the collective identity of a people, and it leaves open to something more disturbing. Yet this disturbance, if welcomed and embraced, is crucial to realising the educative importance of the museum in its contribution to the understanding of the human condition. (shrink)

This study has two goals. First, we present much‐needed empirical linguistic data and systematic analyses on the spatial semantic systems in English and Korean, two languages that have been extensively compared to date in the debate on spatial language and spatial cognition. We conduct our linguistic investigation comprehensively, encompassing the domains of tight‐ and loose‐fit as well as containment and support relations. The current analysis reveals both cross‐linguistic commonalities and differences: From a common set of spatial features, each language highlights (...) a subset of those features for its principal categorization, and those primary features are importantly different between English and Korean: English speakers categorize events predominantly by containment and support relations (and do so with prepositions), whereas Korean speakers categorize them by tight‐fit and loose‐fit relations (and do so with verbs), with a further distinction of containment and support within the loose‐fit relation. The analysis also shows that the tight‐fit domain is more cross‐linguistically diverse in categorization than is the loose‐fit domain. Second, we test the language data against the nonlinguistic categorization results reported in Choi and Hattrup (2012). The results show a remarkable degree of convergence between the patterns predicted from the current linguistic analysis and those found in C&H's nonlinguistic study and thus provide empirical and strong evidence for an influence of language on nonlinguistic spatial cognition. At the same time, the study reveals areas where the two systems closely interact with each other as well as those where one is independent from the other. Taking both parts of the study together, we identify the specific roles that language and spatial perception/cognition play in spatial categorization. (shrink)

Prolegomena to a Carnal Hermeneutics introduces body politics from both Eastern and Western perspectives. Hwa Yol Jung explores Giambattista Vico's anti-Cartesiansim and covers the carnal landscapes of Martin Heidegger, Mikhail Bakhtin, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Luce Irigaray, Marshall McLuhan, and transversal geophilosophy.

This article contributes to normative debates about residential segregation and its relationship to inequality. It defends a position often disregarded in literature: that there is merit to advancing residential integration through some scenarios where advantaged individuals move to disadvantaged areas. It develops this case in dialogue with three other views. In relation to advocates of addressing the inequalities of residential segregation through redistribution, it defends integration as a means of tackling social and political factors that sustain injustice. It challenges those (...) who defend relocating disadvantaged individuals to advantaged areas by highlighting the burdens and demand for cultural assimilation this imposes on the disadvantaged. It considers the worry that advantaged individuals relocating to disadvantaged areas harbours the problematic features of gentrification. It responds that these concerns, while important in some cases, do not arise in all scenarios of this kind. (shrink)

This book responds to the need to help Christians in Asia find a biblical response to pressures in the marketplace. It takes seriously both Scripture and the context Asian Christians function in. It contains a theological framework for grappling with real-time problems, responses from theologians, and actual case studies from the marketplace.

The aim of this essay is to bring to light what I take to be the two most seminal philosophical insights of John Macmurray in the face of the postmodern condition which establishes the foundation and platform of a new philosophy, a new ethics, and a new politics.

The voice of Orpheus symbolizes the everlasting importance of music and poetry in the animus of man. According to the ancient legend, Orpheus by his very gift of music tills the radical sense of enjoyment in us all and enables entire nature to dance in delight. Music resonates the most primordial and invariant mood of man in his harmony with the universe (uni-verse) from time immemorial. On the basis of the image of “roundness” derived from the auditory model of space, (...) an “ecotopia” or a new orientation of ecological ethics is projected. By affirming man as the responsible caretaker of the Earth, it rejects both speciesism and individualism -the antitheses of social principle. (shrink)

This essay attempts to contextualize the importance of Wang Yangming’s 王陽明 philosophy in terms of world philosophy in the manner of Goethe’s innovative plan for “world literature” (Weltliteratur). China has the long history of philosophizing rather than non-philosophy contrary to the glaring and inexcusable misunderstanding of Hegel the Eurocentric universalist or monist. In today’s globalizing world of multicultural pluralism, ethnocentric universalism has become outdated and outmoded. Transversality, which is at once intercultural, interspecific, interdisciplinary, and intersensorial, is a far more befitting (...) response than universality. In this context, what is focused and emphasized in Wang’s world philosophy is mainly fourfold. First, there is the unity or circularity of knowledge and action, that is, knowledge is the beginning of action, and action is the consummation of knowledge. Second, sincerity is the moral soul of Sinism as it is the enabling act of making perform all other virtues, including ren 仁. Third, in Sinism, including Wang’s philosophy, there is no Cartesian dualism in that the mind and the body are inseparable soulmates. Fourth, if ethics is prima philosophia, then geophilosophy is ultima philosophia to sustain and perpetuate all life-forms on earth (geo). (shrink)

Should answers to fundamental questions of political philosophy be ‘convincing’ and ‘meaningful’ to real people with vested interests? Normative behaviourists argue that they should, and this can be achieved by avoiding the use of intuitions in our normative theorizing and instead relying on long-term empirical evidence of human behaviour. In this paper, I argue that to obtain the full benefits of behaviourism, it needs to be accompanied by some form of mentalism. Normative behaviourism sacrifices critical distance from the status quo (...) to provide answers that are convincing and meaningful. However, there is no clear benefit obtained from this sacrifice. Furthermore, because of behaviourism’s institutional focus in its current form, it does not have much to say about how to achieve its goals. Behaviourists can solve both problems by incorporating a mentalist account of political agency, one that determines what values and ideals political agents should fight for and helps political agents develop strategies to achieve their goals. (shrink)

This article puts forward the thesis that in the age of multiculturalism, global communication is rooted in cross-cultural understanding as shown in McLuhan's late communication theory. The American philosopher Ernest Fenollosa went to Japan during the Meiji Restoration when it started in earnest full-scale Westernization. He became fascinated with the poetics of sinography manifested in etymosinology. Etymosinology reveals the depth of the Sinic cultural soul, which is this-worldly, practical, concrete and specific. Sinism (i.e. Confucianism, Daoism and Chan/Zen Buddhism) is a (...) species of relational ontology which is predicated upon the conception of reality as social process. This social process is always already embodied. With the aid of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment, I critically explore and examine the connection between embodiment and `new media' theory. (shrink)

Alcohol addiction can lead to health and social problems. It can also affect people's emotions. Emotion plays a key role in human communications. It is important to recognize the people's emotions at the court and infer the association between the people's emotions and the alcohol addiction. However, it is challenging to recognize people's emotions efficiently in the courtroom. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, no existing work is about the association between alcohol addiction and people's emotions at court. In (...) this paper, we propose a deep learning framework for predicting people's emotions based on sound perception, named ResCNN-SER. The proposed model combines several neural network-based components to extract the features of the speech signals and predict the emotions. The evaluation shows that the proposed model performs better than existing methods. By applying ResCNN-SER for emotion recognition based on people's voices at court, we infer the association between alcohol addiction and the defendant's emotion at court. Based on the sound source data from 54 trial records, we found that the defendants with alcohol addiction tend to get angry or fearful more easily at court comparing with defendants without alcohol addiction. (shrink)

It is generally claimed by Muslims that Islam provides the best safeguards for the freedom and rights of non-Muslim minorities living in Muslim states. But there appears to be serious contradictions between claim and reality both past and present. The evidence shows that these contradictions arise out of both the very nature of Islam in its classical formulations and their abuse by some Muslims. Some proposals are made as to how Christians can help protect the freedom and rights of both (...) Muslims or non-Muslims world-wide and ensure the survival and growth of the Church under Islam today. (shrink)

This volume explores irony – in its essence, saying other than one actually means – in the collected works of Xenophon. Xenophon's Other Voice argues that there are two voices in the author: one ostensible at the level of the literal text, which is available to everyone, while the sub-title designates the other voice, which is less obvious to the reader and indeed, an ironic one. It presents a unified view of the author's entire corpus and argues that the function (...) of Xenophontic irony is to offer critiques of the societies in which he finds himself. Rejecting both non-ironic and Straussian interpretations of Xenophon's writings, Yun Lee Too offers a wholly original perspective on the contemporary debate of how he should be read, which is underpinned by a series of incisive readings of the individual works. Beginning with Xenophon's representation of an ironic Socrates, who condemns the contemporary city and its more prominent citizens, the book moves on to consider how the author develops his own approach to irony. He deploys irony to criticize aspects of Athenian society, such as its understanding of wealth, its armed forces and sophistic education. The book then turns to his treatment of other Hellenic societies, including the Spartan city-state and laws, kingship in Syracuse and war amongst the Greek states. It finally considers Persia, covering Xenophon's depiction of Cyrus the Great and the expedition with Cyrus the Younger. (shrink)