Hi, I'm Will, a philosopher based in Incheon, South Korea. I work on Korean Neo-Daoism, how Neo-Daoist ideas arrived on the peninsula, how they transformed in the hands of Goryeo thinkers. My broader argument is that Korean Daoism deserves a place in the wider history of Neo-Daoist thought, not as a footnote to the Chinese tradition, but as a philosophically original development in its own right.

Much of my research orbits Yi Gyubo (1169–1241), a Korean poet-philosopher who worked at the intersection of Daoist cosmogony, literary aesthetics, and syncretic religion. He's a figure who engages Guo Xiang's doctrine of spontaneous self-generation directly and seriously, then does something with it that has no clear parallel in Chinese Xuanxue. His cosmos generates itself without any directing agent, and yet he persistently harangues that same Creator, calling it the "damn little Creator," blaming it for illness, old age, and grief. I call this affective Neo-Daoism: a phenomenology of what Daoist acceptance actually costs from inside a suffering body, rather than from the idealized vantage of the sage. My dissertation argues this is a genuine philosophical contribution, not a lapse or an inconsistency.

Following this work has taken me from Seoul to Rome, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Budapest, and into broader questions about how philosophical traditions don't just travel, they transform. I'm currently completing my PhD at Sogang University, where I also serve as an editorial assistant on two forthcoming Oxford and Routledge volumes on Korean philosophy. Outside the dissertation, I have work appearing or under review on Goguryeo tomb murals, mountain spirit worship, Confucian ritual music, and the computer game Fallout.