About

Tae-Yeoun Keum is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who joined the university in 2020 after serving four years as the Christopher Tower Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. Her specialization includes Political Theory, Ancient Greek Political Thought, and German Social Thought. Keum is broadly interested in ancient political thought and its reception, 20th century German social thought, and the intersection of political theory and literature. Her research focuses on the role of symbols and myths in politics. She authored the book 'Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought,' which examines Plato's myths and their modern legacy, particularly in the political thought of figures such as More, Bacon, Leibniz, the German Romantics, and Cassirer. Currently, she is working on a second book about Hans Blumenberg, a 20th-century philosopher of myth, in the context of contemporary European debates on the role of symbols, narratives, and imagination in politics. Her work has been published in prominent journals including the American Political Science Review and History of Political Thought.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Art
• Law
• Literature
• Epistemology
• Theology
• Classics
• History

Selected publications

• The Politics of Platonism: Voltaire’s <i>Socrate</i> and the Dynamics of Canons

  Political Theory · 2026-01-24

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  What role do canonical figureheads play in the process by which philosophical ideas gain political substance? This paper explores an interpretive shift in the reception of Plato in eighteenth-century Europe, focusing on Voltaire’s Socrate (1759), a three-act play dramatizing the trial and death of Socrates. I advance a reading of the play as an effort to offer a new political extension of a recent epistemological realignment in interpretations of Plato’s philosophy. Plato’s eighteenth-century readers developed an understanding of his epistemology that negotiated a compromise between Neoplatonism and Academic Skepticism. Working out the political ramifications of this compromise, I argue, was central to Voltaire’s reimagination of Socrates’s trial. In turn, Voltaire’s play calls attention to a neglected dimension in which the contingencies of historically situated, idiosyncratic interpretations can bear out in the dynamics of disciplinary canons: how authors’ philosophical receptions interact with their receptions in political thought. At the same time, the play also offers a case study of an intervention in the symbolic meanings of Plato, one in which the deep-rooted associations he accrued in two ancient traditions that claimed him as a figurehead were reshuffled in a distinctly modern, political key.

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• The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present

  History of European Ideas · 2025-04-28

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• Democracy’s Shadow

  2024-10-24

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  Abstract This chapter considers the problem of populism in Plato’s political thought. Strictly speaking, to discuss populism in the context of the age of Plato is an anachronism. Yet efforts to define the notoriously elusive term “populism” have often coalesced around an opposition between populism and constitutional democracy, where the former represents a special, derivative kind of subversion of the latter. Such a broadly construed tension between a more orthodox form of democracy and its populist counterpart has an important precedent in ancient Athenian political discourse leading up to the age of Plato. In fact, ancient Athenian political thinkers had developed a comparable concept of a kind of shadow democracy that, while parasitic on democracy, ultimately undermined democratic ends. The chapter recasts Plato as a participant in the political tradition devoted to imagining such a tension between democracy and its inversion.

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• Blumenberg and Habermas on Political Myths

  Political Theory · 2024-11-13 · 4 citations

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  Myths—symbolically dense narratives in wide cultural circulation that resist critical scrutiny—are often thought to be counterproductive to political discourse, but they are also ubiquitous in contemporary culture and society. Just two years apart, Jürgen Habermas and Hans Blumenberg developed contrasting visions of how we ought to respond to the myths in our society. By reconstructing their disagreement, this paper uncovers the distinctive challenge of balancing a commitment to political emancipation with the opacity of myths to critical reason. I argue for an alternative approach to myths than those in the theoretical mainstream, taking Blumenberg’s relatively neglected position as a starting point. Blumenberg invites us to pay closer attention to the cognitive needs that necessitate the generation of myths while simultaneously reminding us of our own creative agency to reinvent them.

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• Are Plato's Myths Philosophical?

  Think · 2023 · 1 citations

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  • Epistemology
  • Philosophy
  • Literature

  Abstract Plato is often regarded as a founding figure for Western philosophy, and specifically as the inventor of a way of doing philosophy grounded in critical, argumentative reason. This article asks whether Plato's practice of writing myths in his dialogues comes into tension with his canonical reputation. I suggest that resolving this tension may require us to revise our standing ideas about the nature of philosophy and its relationship to myth. Against interpretations that minimize the significance of Plato's myths to his philosophy, I argue that he may have constructed them deliberately as a form of philosophical discourse in their own right.

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• Introduction: A Symposium on Michael Rosen's The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel, and the Passage from Heaven to History

  The Review of Politics · 2023-01-01

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• Introduction: Myths of Plato, myths of modernity

  Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy · 2023-08-21 · 1 citations

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  This introduction presents an overview of Plato and the Mythic Tradition inPolitical Thought and its central arguments.I situate the contributions of the book within theoretical work on political myth, both traditional and more recent, and also within scholarship on the philosophical function of Plato's myths.Whereas political theorists have long conceived of myth in pathological terms, Plato and the Mythic Tradition joins a growing body of work envisioning a more constructive role for myth in politics and philosophy.This was a task that preoccupied Plato and some of his most significant modern readers.Recovering their common project, moreover, helps us tell a different story about Plato's philosophical myths and their reception in modern political thought.

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• Cultural Change and Philosophy

  The Review of Politics · 2023-01-01

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  The Shadow of God is a magisterial achievement. In that vein, readers may find it especially opportune that this is a book about the concept of immortality—though, in line with the more dynamic picture it presents of our ideas about immortality in shifting cultural landscapes, I make the more modest, though no less impressive, suggestion that this book will stay with students of German Idealism and of political theory at large for a very long time to come.

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• A reply to my critics

  Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy · 2023-08-19

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  ABSTRACTIn this article, I respond to critics of Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought. First, I defend my choice to carve up the concept of myth into deep myths and literary myths. I address concerns that the effective focus of my book on literary myths risks jettisoning the political stakes of myth, and that it may not solve the definitional problems the move seeks to mitigate. Second, I answer my critics' invitation to elaborate on the relationship between myth and critical reason. In particular, I attempt to resolve the tension they perceive between my definition of myth, as a medium that is distinctively opaque to criticism, and my argument that it can complement critical thought.KEYWORDS: Platomythrationalismcanongenre in philosophical writingreception studiesphilosophical discourseRepublicLeibniz Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsTae-Yeoun KeumTae-Yeoun Keum is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought (2020).

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• Editors’ introduction: political myth in the twentieth century

  History of European Ideas · 2023 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Political Science
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Frequent coauthors

• Jill Frank

  1 shared

• Jacob Abolafia

  Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

  1 shared

• Rebecca LeMoine

  1 shared

• Charles Taylor

  1 shared

• Michael Rosen

  1 shared

• Teresa M. Bejan

  University of Oxford

  1 shared

• P.E. Digeser

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1 shared

• Shterna Friedman

  Harvard University Press

  1 shared