Kim Chung-yeol was an Asian philosopher who was an authority on poetry in Chinese language and calligraphy. His pen name was Jung Cheon, meaning Jung is ‘middle’ and Cheon is ‘sky’.

He was born in 1931 and passed away in 2008 in Wonju, his hometown.

He adopted ‘survival’ as his life-long subject of philosophy and was a philosopher who advocated the management of capitalism of the modern history in a righteous way and the life of cultural development embracing cultural diversities. He established his own philosophical structure to harmonize candid feelings of the nature of humans with rationality of righteousness and virtues. He is known to have lived his life of learning, researching, and lecturing. He is also known to lead a moral life in his life. During the 1970s to 1980s, the very dark period of the Korea’s history, Kim Chung-yeol was one of intellectuals who resisted against the injustice of the military government and did his share of social responsibility as an admired intellectual.

He set up a theoretical structure of China’s philosophies that encompass Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, issued hundreds of theses and papers on Asian philosophies, and was a philosophy professor. He was definitely a philosopher who represented Asian philosophy in Korea. In honor of his philosophies, Wonju city built ‘Jun Cheon Philosophy Library’ in 2015. The Library is the first and only philosophy-dedicated library in Korea and serves as cultural space for citizens.

He started writing Chinese poems in his young years and left about 300 Chinese poems that show pleasures, angers, troubles, and delights of life. His Chinese poems, which include messages about humanities and philosophies, expanded the outer manifestation of his own philosophy, ‘candid feelings of the nature of humans with rationality of righteousness and virtues, and applied literary sensibility to philosophies.

He was selected as a national scholarship student in 1956 and studied in philosophy department of National Taiwan University, and received a master’s degree of philosophy in 1962. He continued studying in China and got a doctorate in 1974.

In 1965, he started working as a philosophy professor of Gyeongbuk National University and he taught also at Gyemyung University and Chinese Culture University of Taiwan. From 1970 to 1996, he served as a philosophy professor of Korea University. He was listed as a member of The National Academy of Sciences in 2006.