Yu Hyŏngwŏn in the perspective of early-modern European intellectuals

Abstract

This speculative essay suggests the possibility of a different perspective on the question whether Pan’gye Yu Hyŏngwŏn (1622-1673) was in any sense a modern thinker, the question that has preoccupied both Korean scholars and James Palais (and prompted them to provide quite different answers). What was Pan’gye’s thought like if seen from a seventeenth-century or eighteenth-century European perspective rather than a nineteenth- or twenty–century perspective, which has too frequently been applied to it? And might this perhaps change our perception of the usefulness of the concept of modernity? The focus will be on a number of intellectuals who were active in north-western Europe and particularly in The Netherlands, France and Germany.