Events Calendar

Is shame always a negative concept? Can it have a positive effect on our civic life, personal development, business, politics, or interpersonal relationship?  How do the East and the West view "shame" differently? The talk will analyze the moral pyschology of Confucian shame as an embodied moral emotion necessary for human flourishing from the perspective of interdiscpilinary and comparative philosophy and cognitive science.

Dr. Bongrae Seok is Professor of Philosophy at Alvernia University in Reading, Pennsylvania. His primary research interests lie in comparative philosophy of mind and moral psychology, philosophy of cognitive neuroscience, neuroethics and neuroasesthetics. In his recent books, Naturalization, Human Flourishing, and Asian Philosophy: Owen Flanagan and Beyond (Routledge 2020), Moral Psychology of Confucian Shame: Shame of Shamelessness (Rowman and Littlefield 2016), and Embodied Moral Psychology and Confucian Philosophy (Lexington 2013), he develops an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to moral psychology from the viewpoint of embodied moral emotion (empathy, shame, and flourishing). He also published articles on phenomenology and perception of music (embodied musical imagery, and musical chills) and embodied perception of space from the interdisciplinary perspective of philosophy, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. His current work focuses on interdisciplinary and comparative topics (including embodied and affective moral intuition, empathic nociception, relational categorization and taxonomic reasoning, mindfulness meditation, affordances and affectances, and aesthetic experience) that bring Asian philosophy to the forefront of cognitive science. He is the winner of the ISCP essay contest (2019) of the Charles Fu Foundation and Program Chair of the APA (American Philosophical Association) affiliated group of NAKPA (North American Korean Philosophical Association). He has served ACPA (Association of Chinese Philosophers in America) as president from 2018 to 2020.

Free and Open to the Public. For more information, contact Ann A. Pang-White, Director of Asian Studies and Professor of Philosophy, at ann.pang-white@scranton.edu