Byeong-Uk YiProfile page
Professor
University of Toronto Mississauga, Department of Philosophy
- ProfessorUniversity of Toronto Mississauga, Department of Philosophy
BIO
Prof Byeong-Uk Yi is a philosopher at the University of Toronto who specializes in metaphysics and philosophy of language, logic and philosophy of mathematics. He was born in South Korea, and studied philosophy at Seoul National University before moving to the US for graduate study in 1987. He studied in the Department of History & Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Department of Philosophy at UCLA, where he received a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1995. Then he held academic appointments in the University of Alberta, University of Queensland, University of Glasgow, and University of Minnesota before joining the University of Toronto, where he is presently Associate Professor of Philosophy. His recent work focuses on the nature of the many as such, and the logic and meaning of expressions used to talk about them, such as plural constructions found in English and many other natural languages. He also work on the nature of stuff, semantics of mass nouns, semantics of classifiers of East Asian languages (e.g., Korean, Chinese, Japanese), and some issues in philosophy of science, decision theory, and history of philosophy. He published a book, Understanding the Many (Routledge, 2002), and many articles in international academic journals in philosophy and logic, and am working on a book on plural constructions, Plurals: Their Logic and Semantics. The awards he have received include I. W. Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta (1996-7), University of Queensland Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (1998-9), McKnight Land-grant Professorship (2003-5), and American Council of Learned Society Fellowship (2008-9). He used to spend quite some time playing go, an ancient board game similar to chess and popular in East Asian countries, but have not managed to do so recently.
ACADEMIC POSITIONS
- Associate ProfessorUniversity of Toronto, Toronto, Canada2006 - 2007
- ProfessorUniversity of Toronto, Dept. of Philosophy, Toronto, Canada2014 - present
NON-ACADEMIC POSITIONS
- LecturerUniversity of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, United States1995 - 1995
- I. W. Killam Postdoctoral FellowUniversity of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada1996 - 1997
- Postdoctoral Research FellowUniversity of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia1998 - 1997
- Permanent LecturerUniversity of Glasgow, Department of Philosophy, Glasgow, United Kingdom1999 - 2000
- Assistant ProfessorUniversity of Minnesota, Dept. of Philosophy, Minneapolis, United States2000 - 2005
- McKnight Land-Grant ProfessorUniversity of Minnesota, Minneapolis, United States2003 - 2005
- Visiting ResearcherSeoul National University, Institute of Philosophy, Seoul, South Korea2004 - 2004
- Associate ProfessorUniversity of Minnesota, Dept. of Philosophy, Minneapolis, United States2005 - 2006
- AKS Senior FellowAcademy of Korean Studies, Seongnam-si, South Korea2013 - 2014
- Visiting ResearcherSeoul National University, Seongnam-si, South Korea2013 - 2013
- Kyung Hee International ScholarKyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea2014 - 2019
DEGREES
- BA & MASeoul National University, Seoul, Korea1978 - 1984
- PhD programUC Irvine, United States1987 - 1988
- MAUniversity of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States1988 - 1990
- PhDUniversity of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, United States1990 - 1995
AVAILABILITY
- Media enquiries