Korean philosophy at Hildesheim, Chinese science at Hangzhou: October's diary

Early October is when the autumn term's conference machinery starts turning, and the first fortnight of the month sends an unusual signal about where the discipline's attention is drifting. The meetings with the most to say over the next three weeks are not in the lecture halls that usually anchor an October diary. They are in Lower Saxony and in the Yangtze delta, and their subject is the part of philosophy that the standard Western syllabus has spent a long time treating as someone else's business: Korean thought from the age of colonial rule, and the way Chinese scholars have written the history of their own encounter with modern science.

Philosophers News has already logged the season's larger fixtures — the October clusters in Vienna and elsewhere, the metaphysics meetings, and the seven mid-sized gatherings set out in a separate October diary. What follows is a supplement to those, built the same way: every date, venue and convener below has been checked against the organiser's own page rather than against the listing sites that copy them. Two of the meetings turned out to be on our books already, and are noted here only in passing. Several more that are circulating in the aggregators could not be confirmed at all, and are named at the end rather than quietly dropped.

The through-line is not hard to miss. For a fortnight in October the busiest corners of the calendar are the ones furthest from the places where "philosophy" is usually assumed to happen.

Hildesheim gives Korean philosophy four consecutive days#

The University of Hildesheim, through its Center for Advanced Studies "Philosophizing in a Globalized World" — GloPhi for short — has turned the first week of October into something close to a Korean philosophy festival. Two distinct meetings run back to back.

The first, on 5 and 6 October, is the eleventh annual conference of the North American Korean Philosophy Association, held this year in Germany rather than in North America, under the title Korean Philosophy: From a Comparative and Intercultural Perspective. NAKPA is the main scholarly body outside Korea devoted to the field, and the choice of Hildesheim as host says something about where the centre of gravity in the study of Korean thought now sits. It is no longer only in Seoul and in a handful of North American departments; it has acquired a European foothold in a research centre built expressly to test whether the categories of nineteenth-century European philosophy survive translation into traditions that did not produce them.

The second meeting, on 7 and 8 October, is a workshop titled Modern Korean Thinkers: Late 19th Century to 1945, convened by Sool Park, Dobin Choi and Hyojin Lee and held in a seminar room — HC.G.2.07 — rather than a plenary hall. The period it takes up is the hinge of modern Korean intellectual history: the decades in which Korean thought had to respond at once to the collapse of the old Confucian order, to religious reform movements, to Japanese colonial rule from 1910, and to the arrival of European philosophy as both an instrument of that rule and a proposed answer to it.

The workshop's method is the part worth pausing on. Rather than a parade of twenty-minute papers read at each other, each session takes a single thinker and reads, together, a key text newly available in English translation. That is a reading group's format scaled up to a conference, and it reflects the field's actual condition. The primary sources are only now reaching a readership that cannot work from the Korean, and the first task is to read them slowly rather than to theorise about them quickly. A discipline that has its canonical texts to hand can afford to argue about interpretations; one that is still assembling the texts in a language its wider audience can read has to do the humbler work first.

Behind both meetings is a question larger than Korea. It is whether the concept of "philosophy" the discipline inherited from the German nineteenth century — systematic, secular, written by named individuals disputing with one another — is the right net to cast over a tradition in which the lines between philosophy, religious practice and political reform were drawn differently, or not at all. Decide that modern Korean thought counts as philosophy only where it looks like European philosophy, and most of it drops out of view. Decide otherwise, and the definition of the subject has to be rewritten for everyone, not merely for the Korean case. Hildesheim's whole programme is a standing argument that the second option is the honest one, and the back-to-back scheduling of a disciplinary conference and a close-reading workshop is a fair picture of how that argument proceeds: at the level of institutions in the first week, and at the level of the page in the second.

In Hangzhou, the history of science is treated as a philosophical problem#

Three weeks later, on 24 and 25 October, a smaller and more specialised meeting convenes at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Historiography of Science in China, organised under the banner of the university's CWB Philosophy of Science group, gathers contributors to a forthcoming special issue of Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science, the open-access journal published out of the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. The arrangement is that of a proper workshop rather than a conference: papers are circulated in advance, and the two days are given over to discussing manuscripts most of the room has already read. Pre-circulation is a quiet editorial discipline — it rewards the participant who has done the reading and penalises the one who turns up to perform — and it tends to produce the special issues that are actually worth publishing.

The subject is deceptively technical. Historiography of science is the study not of scientific facts but of how the history of science gets written: which episodes are treated as turning points, which figures as heroes, what is counted as progress and what as error. Applied to China the question acquires an edge. The conventional story, told from Europe, has China receiving modern science from the West after the Industrial Revolution, a latecomer importing a finished product. The editors of the Transversal issue — Yafeng Shan of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Bohang Chen of Zhejiang — are after something less tidy. They want to know how Chinese intellectuals have themselves narrated that encounter, and whether the frame of "import" survives contact with the record. Was the meeting of Chinese thought and Western science a transfer, a translation, or a collision that altered both parties? The wager of the meeting is that the answer is a problem in philosophy and not only in history, and that who writes the history is itself a philosophical decision with consequences.

That a China-focused issue is edited partly from Hong Kong and published from Brazil is not incidental; it is the condition under which this kind of work now circulates. Readers who follow the philosophy of science eastward will find the Hangzhou meeting of a piece with the larger congress scheduled for Kobe in 2027. The field's centre of production is no longer only in the cities that invented it.

Two meetings already on our books#

Two further October fixtures belong to the same eastward drift, and both have been reported here. The fifth Philosophy and AI workshop, PhAI5, meets at Hokkaido University in Sapporo on 16 and 17 October, co-hosted with departments in Hong Kong and Beijing and given over to questions in the philosophy of language and epistemology raised by large language models; the details are in our October conference diary. In November the argument moves to Shanghai, where Fudan University stages a two-day congress at which scholars of Chinese philosophy will test Timothy Williamson's epistemology against their own tradition, with Williamson replying in person — an event we set out, with the autumn's other November dates, in the seasonal calendar. Neither is repeated below.

What could not be confirmed#

A diary is only as trustworthy as the items it declines to print. Several meetings now circulating in the listings could not be verified against any organiser's page, and are therefore absent from the entries above.

A cluster of Indian meetings advertised for this month — comparative philosophy at Pondicherry, epistemology at Jaipur, a history-of-philosophy gathering at Bhubaneswar, applied ethics in Goa, a conference at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi — appears in aggregated calendars without a confirmable announcement at the hosting institutions. So does an online "International Conference on African Philosophy" said to run on 19 and 20 October. A lecture on the aesthetics and metaphysics of mirror images, attributed to the University of Tokyo's centre for philosophy and dated 9 October, could not be found on that centre's published programme. It is entirely possible that some or all of these are real and merely under-published in English. The point is that we cannot say so, and the honest course is to report the gap rather than to launder a listing into a confirmation.

That gap is worth dwelling on, because it cuts against the very theme of this diary. The meetings reported here are genuinely outside the old Anglo-European core, yet they are reportable precisely because Hildesheim, Hangzhou and Sapporo publish in English or German on platforms indexed from the global North. A calendar assembled from public English-language announcements will reliably find the Korean conference held in Germany and miss the one held in Gwangju, and the absence will read as inactivity rather than as a limit of the instrument. The eastward drift is real. So is the blind spot that renders part of it legible and leaves the rest in the dark, and a diary that did not admit the second would be misrepresenting the first.