Greetings,

The Institute for Philosophy and Thought at Seoul National University is hosting a guest lecture with Professor Oh Geun-chang from Incheon University on the topic "The End of Progress?: A Reconsideration of Habermas’s Social Evolutionism." We invite anyone interested to participate.

• Date: October 14, 2024 (Monday), 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
• Location: Humanities Building 6, Room 403 (Institute for Philosophy and Thought)
• Speaker: Oh Geun-chang (Professor at Incheon University)
• Title: The End of Progress?: A Reconsideration of Habermas’s Social Evolutionism

Lecture Content: This presentation addresses Habermas’s social evolutionism and the debates surrounding it. The speaker will first explain the main points of Habermas’s social evolutionism, followed by a discussion of Amy Allen's critique that his universalism is not sufficiently universal. In response to this critique, the speaker will examine several historical-philosophical options available to Habermas, arguing that a response based on the distinction between developmental logic and developmental mechanics is the most promising position. However, Habermas himself has not fully elaborated on the implications of this distinction; the speaker will suggest that it can be supplemented based on an interpretation of social evolutionism grounded in anthropology.

Speaker Introduction: After graduating from the Department of Philosophy at Seoul National University and obtaining a master's degree from the same university, he received his Ph.D. from Purdue University in the United States. After serving as a senior researcher at Sungkyunkwan University, he is currently working as a research professor at the Incheon University Institute of Humanities while teaching at Seoul National University. His main research interests include social philosophy, contemporary European philosophy, and historical philosophy, and he has published related research papers in academic journals such as Philosophia, Theoria, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and Philosophy.