Seung was a professor of Philosophy, Government, and Law at the University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts.
After the end of the Korean War, on the personal recommendation of President Syngman Rhee, Seung enrolled at Yale University on a full scholarship under the sponsorship of the American-Korean Foundation and resumed his undergraduate studies in 1954.
As resident of Timothy Dwight College and a student in the Directed Studies program, he discovered the history of Western culture.
At Yale he was mentored by a number of famous professors, including Thomas G. Bergin, Cleanth Brooks, Brand Blanshard, and F.S.C.
He entered Yale Law School, but quit after one academic year, deciding instead to pursue doctoral studies in philosophy.
While still a graduate student he wrote and published his first book, The Fragile Leaves of the Sibyl: Dante's Master Plan, which proposed a new, "trinitarian" interpretation of the Divine Comedy.
His son, Sebastian Seung, is Professor at the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute and Department of Computer Science.
[2][failed verification] In 1988, he was awarded the highest honor of Yale's graduate school alumni association—the Wilbur Cross Medal.
In his career at the University of Texas at Austin, Seung published ten monographs, including books on Dante, Kant, Structuralism, Hermeneutics, Rawls, Plato, Nietzsche, Wagner, and Goethe.
"Plural Values and Indeterminate Rankings," with Daniel Bonevac, in Ethics 799 (1992) "Virtues and Values: A Platonic Account," in Social Theory and Practice 207 (1991) "Kant's Conception of the Categories," in Review of Metaphysics 107 (1989) "Conflict in Practical Reasoning," with Daniel Bonevac, Philosophical Studies 315: 53 (1988) "Literary Function and Historical Context," in Philosophy and Literature 33: 4 (1980) "Thematic Dialectic: A Revision of Hegelian Dialectic," in International Philosophical Quarterly 417: 20 (1980) "The Epic Character of the Divina Commedia and the Function of Dante's Three Guides," in Italica 352: 56 (1979) "Semantic Context and Textual Meaning," in Journal of Literary Semantics, 8:2 (1979) Contributions "Defeasible Reasoning and Moral Dilemmas," with Rob Koons, in Defeasible Deontic Logic, edited by Donald Nute (Springer, 1997) "The Metaphysics of the Commedia," in The Divine Comedy and the Encyclopedia of Arts and Sciences, edited by G. Di Scipio and A. Scaglione (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 1988) "Kant," in The Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Mircea Eliade (New York: Free Press, 1987) "The Philosophical Tradition in Korea," in Tae Kwon Do Free Fighting, edited by Gaeshik Kim (Seoul: Nanam Publications, 1985) "Bonaventura's Figural Exemplarism in Dante," in Italian Literature: Roots and Branches: Essays in honor of Thomas G. Bergin, edited by G. Rimanelli and K. Atchity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976)