The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of Maum(마음, 心) to sociological theory and social thought. Maum as one of key terms has been remarkably mobilized in many discourses. It is a medium of communications in the Korean tradition. Maum is very often found in a number of texts over intellectual history of Korea, while it has been neglected in sociology, which is more interested in theorizing with reason/rationality or emotions. The authors think that maum is decisive to understand actor’s self-reflective interpretation of own state of mind and activities, on the one hand and to recognize the way of expanding the ranges of common grounds among actors in Korea. For this purpose, the Annals of Chosun Dynasty, which includes nearly five hundred years records on political and administrative affairs in the dialogues between kings and administrators and civil officers, are analyzed and the usages of maum are summarized. Especially, some cases on Hapsim(합심, 合心) are analyzed for explaining how maum is crucial to improve the level of sympathized communication.

Can Confucian legacy contribute to the reformulation of civilizations, which means the civilizational transition of Eurocentric world order to multipolar balanced one, in the 21th century? This essay finds a positive answer. Firstly, in comparison of Karl Jaspers' Axial Age idea with author's overlapping modernities theory, this essay finds a philosophical path to widen civilizational common ground. In this context, the legacies of Confucian criticism and ethics are newly understood as an important axis around which civilizational reformulation enacts. Especially, Confucian political criticism, Confucian welfare institutions, and Confucian feminism are discussed as resources that can be creatively revitalized nowadays.

This study purports to get a clue for the new paradigm of political leadership through reconfiguration of Confucius' thoughts of cosmic resonance(gan ying, 感應) found in “The Analects of Confucius”. This effort could be meaningful in the sense that first, it could expand the conventional Western fashion of study on political leadership toward new political leadership paradigm, and second, it also helps investigate a new political leadership which makes it possible to retain human nature of co-existence even without the reinforcement by law and institutions. Specifically this study examines; 1) a genealogical record of modern and present Western political leadership thoughts based upon main contents and historical processes, 2) the potential limits of those Western thoughts theoretically as well as practically, 3) and finally Confucius' thoughts on cosmic resonance(gan ying, 感應) in order to overcome the limits of Western political leadership theory and explore the possibility to contribute to the expansion of new political leadership in general.

This paper aimed to verify the modern view on human in the Choe Han-ki's Ki-hak(philosophy of Ki). The great part of Choe Han-ki study paid attention to the scientific achievement but overlooked the modern view on human of a western science as a ground for his Ki-hak. Through this study, I could find some modern ideological factors and logical systems in the Ki-hak, in spite of having many traditional, neo-confucian, non-scientific, and anti-positivist factors. By this, I could explain the anthropologic foundation of the view on human of Choe Han-ki who undertook the role of connection between premodern and modern. I can summarize the connotations of the view on human of Choe Han-ki's Ki-hak as follows. First, the view on human of the Ki-hak allowed positivist approach to the study of human by understanding human as Ki's being. Second, the view on human of Ki suggested the possibility of infinite progress of human by emphasizing the disenchantment of reason. Third, the view on human of Ki-hak provided ideological base for the birth of individual human by emphasizing human subjectivity which is free from the totalitarian world-view of neo-confucianism. Forth, the view on human of Ki-hak had scientific perspective which the perception for matter depend on Dea-ki-un-wa as a natural law. It regards the physical law of nature as a normative principle of human society. Fifth, the view on human of Ki-hak perceives human as social being in the fact that it look for human morality in the social relationship, not in the innate nature. Sixth, the view on human of Ki-hak had optimistic world view in the fact that it hold belief for successive progress of the human mind.

This thesis aims at to analyse the Deutsch death education at the perspectives of oriental thoughts. We used the concepts of ‘problem-solving’ and ‘problem-annulment’ as the tools to analyse it. The ‘problem-solving’ has two fallacies, one is to devide the problem from me and the other is to look the problem as bad thing. The Deutsche death education has the same fallacies. But the death education as ‘problem-annulment’ has no such fallacies because the aim of death education is to make sure that there are no death in our life. We can see many these ideas in oriental sacred books.

Homo Sapience appeared on earth 5 million years ago. They wandered as a hunter and gather with 10 to 100 family members. With the advent of agricultural revolution, humans settled in one place and formed a bigger community. As the agricultural area and population grew, different communities clashed, and in the end, resulted in still the larger community dispersed in many areas. The tribal societies clashed and merged into a kingdom with manu tribes. And in modern world about a hundred years ago, the kingdom turned into a nation state where discriminations against sex, race, religion, and language were abolished, which is a qualitative integration of and expansion of people's life sphere. With modern Industrial Revolution, sciences and technologies developed exponentially, which is called 'Singularity' in mathematics. Information Revolution of Computers and internet developed late 20th century is expanding human life to the whole world, which is the extension of the process of expansion from clan society to tribal society, kingdom, and nation state. National borders are being lowered and breaking up in manu ways. In the 21th century, sciences and technologies are developing still faster and exponentially resulting in the acceleration of globalization. As EU shows, it seems that human civilization entered the age of merger of states and one global government may emerge in the future.

This study seeks to propose the theme that human body is being reduced to the stock of information. Such reduction is due to the development of IT, BT, NT and the formation of a new technological paradigm led by the convergence of aforementioned technologies. In consequence, body is considered to be something that can be decomposed, mixed, assembled, transformed and newly produced, rather than to be understood as fixed, natural and integrated organisms. Newly restructured post-body shows itself both in the implosion of machine and organism, and the fusion, duplication and customization of heterogeneous organisms. Post-body, where the hybrid of the artificial and natural is being imploded and converged is becoming the very condition of existence of our times. Such phenomenon is a direct result of our body being reduced to mere information. Organism, once a part of the universe and then reduced to machines, is now regarded as an existence which is based on information generation. Body being reduced to information, not only absorb and store information but also transform itself according to the information gathered and processed. Our body, is considered to be an existence with a special engine sensing, sorting and organizing information. For this reason, our body is to be perceived from the viewpoint of an information processing system. Given the propositions, this paper seeks to (1) identify that our conception of body is closely related with our world view reflecting ongoing techno-social dynamics, (2) examine the process where high technologies like IT, BT and NT are converging on information technological system (3) discuss current situations that our body tends to transform itself into such technological system.

This essay aims at establishing a concept of possibility of ‘realizing human-oriented economy’ and its modern applicability through ‘redefining and reestablishing the location of the market’ which is the central theme of Karl Polanyi's ‘transformational’ socioeconomic idea. Overall discussion is conducted on an equal footing representing that the civilizational agony that Polanyi viewed is much the same as that in our time. In particular, having considered the matter of today’s economic crisis, Polanyi’s idea of human-oriented economy that society must to be independent from the market, being radically different from the stereotypical market-oriented ideology which focuses largely on maximization of the disengaged role of the market, generates a reflexive transformation of our idea of market economy. Therefore, following Polanyi’s position, we examine interrelationship between market and society, pointing to the possibility of the social economic organization that creates the ‘social values’. This is thereby to suggest that the social economic organization should be activated in order to rehabilitate the faulty society affected by the harmful effect of the market economy. The concept of 'weaving economy' is one of these activation methodologies. The primary purpose of the weaving economy, which comprises three concepts of ‘The Civil Society’, ‘redistribution, exchange and reciprocity of social organization’, and ‘rehabilitation spirit’, is to create a new form of society. We suggest in this regard that the social economic organizations such as e.g, ‘social enterprise’, ‘community business’, ‘cooperative association’, ‘self-support business’ and ‘fair trade’, all of which are being conducted tentatively in our society, could be some examples of the requirements for creating a new society, of which the market functions not merely to maximize profits and utilities, but also to create the social values.

Over the course of the genealogy of K. Mannheim and M. Scheler's paradigm of ideological knowledge, paradigm of day-to-day knowledge, paradigm of scientific institution, paradigm of scientific knowledge, and more recently, N. Luhmann's paradigm of academic system, the study of knowledge has become positioned as a key research area of sociology. While the paradigm of ideological knowledge has pioneered a new area in the sociology of knowledge by pointing out social class, location and generation as most significant determinants of knowledge, phenomenology has expanded the horizons of the field to the day-to-day knowledge. In contrast, due to his primary concern to identify the normative structure of science, Robert K. Merton has turned to the 'institutional conditions' of the development of scientific knowledge. On the other hand, following social constructivism, the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge in Britain has meticulously tracked and analyzed processes by which specific scientific knowledges are created. Finally, Niklas Luhmann is often considered as the sociologist who led system-theoretical turn of the study of knowledge. Luhmann argued that Merton encountered the inherent limitations of prescriptivism by generalizing the norms in scientists’ community despite the fact that they were derived from specific historical experience of the Western world. Luhmann also contended that the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge abandoned ambition to be the general theory of knowledge by focusing on space-time specific and historicity of knowledge formation - that is, the effect of special conditions of each individual cases in a particular time and place on scientific research activities. The principal purpose of his theoretical works was to provide a universal theory of knowledge that overcomes the limits of time and space, and goes beyond the coercion of the normativism. With the advent of the era of Science and Technology, studies of knowledge have also been facing a new challenge. Notably, non-knowledge or ignorance is emerging as a new concern not only in the studies of knowledge but also in the sociology of risk or environmental sociology. As a result, positive attitude of the general public and widespread optimism to knowledge in the academic world is showing signs of skepticism. Therefore, if appropriate answers to these new challenges were not provided, the sociology of knowledge is likely to fall into an anachronistic and regressive ‘obsoledge’.

Korean people's attitudes about family and various social phenomena associated with family, it is one of a major concern of academia. And most of the family-related studies utilize the concept of the ‘familism’. The concept of familism can not use as the analytical concept, because the familism contains various viewpoints about the family. For this reason, we review the existing studies of family-related. According to the results of the review, attitudes and viewpoints that the familism contains were categorized into three attitudes below, (1) family-attachments, and (2) familydependence, (3) family-centered. Furthermore, Family-related social problems to be found in Korea, it was found that it is deeply associated with Family-centered. In order to utilize for related research, it was defined as the ‘family-centrism’. In addition, (1) Family-attachments and (2) Familydependence are a common phenomenon that is found in most societies, and ⑶ Family-centrism is a particular phenomenon occurred in the process of transition to the modern. The ‘family-centrism’ can be utilized as the analytical concept for understanding the society that does not diminish the importance of the family.

In accelerating informatization, life world of humanity has been newly formed through expanding ability of digital technology. Although the trend is heading for smart society, the cognition of recent discussion on the information society has been focused on pessimism. This study is begun reflexive cognition that recent researches about information technology undervalue the possibility of positive aspect. In order to find out the relation among Digital life-world and happiness, this study classified daily life to being, relation and activity and analyzed using needs, practice, social recognition and satisfaction factors which affect to happiness at daily life area. According to the analysis result, all areas of daily life which utilize digital technology affect happiness and differently determined happiness factors by each area. The being affected the practice, the relation affected the social recognition and the activity affected the practice, the social recognition and the satisfaction while measuring the degree of happiness. As a result, this study figured things out that Digital Life-world is able to be the important factor which affects happiness and are required various methods for improving degree of happiness. Thus, more efforts are needed for investigating the relation between the information society and happiness.