T. K. Seung - Background

Background

Seung was born on September 20, 1930, the eldest of three children, near the city of Jungju in the Pyeonganbukdo Province of Korea. He attended Jungju Middle School, where he was exposed to Western-style education. In 1947, he escaped from North Korea, crossing the 38th parallel with a few friends. He settled in Seoul, South Korea, where he studied at Seoul High School for three years. He attended Yonsei University for only one month before the Korean War broke out in June 1950, subsequently fleeing south to Pusan ahead of the advancing North Korean army. There he enlisted in the ROK Army and served throughout the war, eventually attaining the rank of captain.

After the end of the Korean War, Seung went to Yale University on a full scholarship and resumed his undergraduate studies in 1954. As a student in the Directed Studies program, he discovered the history of Western culture. He was introduced to the latest schools of thought such as existentialism, New Criticism, and other intellectual movements. At Yale he was mentored by a number of famous professors, including Thomas G. Bergin, Cleanth Brooks, Brand Blanshard, and F.S.C. Northrop. He graduated summa cum laude in 1958 with a bachelor's degree in philosophy. He entered Yale Law School, but quit after one academic year, deciding instead to pursue doctoral studies in philosophy. Around this time he wrote his first book, The Fragile Leaves of the Sibyl: Dante's Master Plan, which proposed a new, "trinitarian" interpretation of the Divine Comedy. His Ph.D. thesis was later published as a book, Kant's Transcendental Logic.

In 1965, he received his Ph.D. and also married Kwihwan Hahn, a graduate of Juilliard in piano performance. They have three children. His son, Sebastian Seung, is Professor of Computational Neuroscience at MIT. After teaching for a year at Fordham University, he joined the philosophy department of the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, where he is the Jesse H. Jones Professor in Liberal Arts, Professor of Philosophy, Government, and Law.