Date : May 13, 2022
Format: Hybrid
Co-organized by: SKKU’sInstitute of Confucian Philosophy and Culture, the Center for Contemporary Studies of East Asian Classics and Critical Confucianism (CCECC), and the National Research Foundation of Korea

The purpose of CCECC is to reconstruct civic virtues of the Confucian tradition from the past classics and to use them for getting a profound understanding of contemporary Korean society. For this, we consider cultural psychological studies that concern modern Korean’s psychological structure and value standards, keeping in mind, however, that it is always a demanding challenge to get a comprehensive understanding of a people’s psychology. It is also inadequate to reconstruct some East Asian traditional virtues as those suitable for modern society by the single reference to either an existing psychological method or an analysis of East Asian Classics. Accordingly, a constructive dialogue between the two different fields, cultural psychology and Confucianism, centering around “modern Korean cultural psychology,” is required/needed for reconstructing Confucian civic virtues.

Achievement : At this conference, several cultural psychology researchers suggested the ways of analyzing Korean psychology and the traditional virtues. Additionally, CCECC’s researchers sought the possibility of reconstructing Confucian traditional virtues based on the research results of cultural psychology. With this, the strengths and shortcomings of cultural psychological approaches were examined with respect to CCECC’s goal of “rediscovering and reconstructing Confucian civic virtues based on the understanding of modern Korean psychology.”