Chang Dobin. History of Korean Thought (1925)

In 1925, during the Japanese rule, the Korean historian and resistance activist Chang Dobin (1888-1963) wrote the first history of Korean philosophy in the Korean language, History of Korean Thought. For Chang, the history of philosophy is a powerful tool for nation-building and anti-colonial resistance: the Korean people should be freed from the sinocentric burden of the past, in order to develop a form of historical subjectivity suitable for a modern nation-state. Chang constructs a linear narrative from prehistory to the 19th century, creating a prototype of Korean intellectual history as a dialectical competition between the Korean and the cultural Other.