Professor Kyu-Cheol, Park of the College of Liberal Arts at our university has been appointed as the 34th president of the Korean Institute of East-West Philosophy.

Upon taking office as president, Professor Park proposed that the collective intelligence of the philosophy community be used to prepare a history of world philosophy. As President Park has already proposed to independently delve into the problems of Western philosophy, there is also interest in his proposal to write a history of world philosophy based on the power of collective intelligence.

In his inaugural speech as the 34th president of the Korean Eastern and Western Philosophy Association and the Leader Spirit Institute's Autumn Academic Conference 2024, held at Chungnam National University on November 30, Park said, “If we want to include not only the existing Western philosophy history but also the philosophy history of the Middle East, India, China, Korea, and Japan, and include the philosophy history of Africa, Oceania, Latin America, and even Native Americans, which have not been discussed before, in the category of world philosophy history, the writing of the world philosophy history should be done not alone but with the power of collective intelligence.” He also said, “At the 2025 Spring Academic Conference, we will discuss how to write the history of world philosophers.” Past, Present, and Future” at the 2025 Spring Academic Conference.

He also said, “The neighboring Japanese philosophy community published a total of nine volumes (including separate volumes) of the World History of Philosophy published by Chikuma Shobo, with 115 Japanese philosophers participating, with Kunitake Ito, Shiro Yamauchi, Takahiro Nakajima, and Noburu Nonomiya as the editors-in-chief in 2020.”

Kyu-Cheol, Park, the president of the university, earned a doctorate in Plato's Gorgias, but since he was appointed as a professor at the College of Liberal Arts at Kookmin University in 2013, he has been intensively researching the philosophy of ancient Stoicism, and in 2022, he published “The Doubting Human” (2022, Cheongrim Publishing) as a result of his research. This book was also selected for the Korean Philosophical Association Academic Award (2022), the Korean Eastern and Western Philosophical Association Writing Award (2022), and the Sejong Academic Book Award (2023).

Meanwhile, the Korean Eastern and Western Philosophy Association, established in 1983, has played a pivotal role in the Korean philosophy community, laying the foundation for harmony and unity between Eastern and Western philosophy. It holds two international and domestic academic conferences every year to seek alternatives to the problems facing the times, and publishes the journal “Eastern and Western Philosophy Research,” which is listed by the National Research Foundation of Korea, four times a year.