Department of Philosophy

Visitors

For information on becoming a special student, visiting fellow, or visting scholar, please contact the Special Student/Visiting Fellow Office; contact information is located at the bottom of the page.

Jasmin Engelbrecht

I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Leipzig (Germany), and I am primarily interested in how contemporary discussions can be benefited by an understanding of Kant and Hegel. My dissertation deals with criticism of Kant's idea of “synthetic a priori judgments” in twentieth century philosophy and the potential for Hegel's notion of “Concept” to be used to defend Kant's view against such criticisms. I'm spending the 2009-2010 academic year as a Fellow in Philosophy at Harvard.

Dong Wook Jung

I am a Ph.D. student in history and philosophy of science at Seoul National University. My primary research areas are in philosophy of science and engineering. I'm especially interested in the nature and the roles of models in science and engineering. I'm currently working with the evolutionary models in biology and economics. 

Michael Jungert

I am a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at the University of Tübingen (Germany) and a Fellow in Philosophy at Harvard in 2009-2010. My primary research areas are in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of science and in metaethics. The topic of my Ph.D. project is the relationship between (autobiographical) memory and self as well as the notion of truth in memory. For further information please visit my page at http://www.izew.uni-tuebingen.de/kolleg/koll_jungert_en.html

Fauve Lybaert

I am a PhD-student at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and work on personal identity and the formal self. I will be visiting Harvard till September 2010. This is my PhD-proposal. If you have any comments or work in the same field, please let me know!

Erik Rietveld

Erik is fascinated by the fact that in many situations in our daily lives we act adequately, yet unreflectively. For instance, we effortlessly maintain an appropriate distance from the other people in an elevator, or without deliberation stop the pedestrian next to us, who, while about to cross the street, does not notice an oncoming car. Often we just act, and normally this immediate action is appropriate.

The overall aim of his post-doc research project at Harvard University is to contribute to a better understanding of such adequate unreflective action. He approaches this phenomenon primarily from a philosophical perspective, but one that is open to interaction with psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Issues he works on concern the nature of intentionality, normativity, freedom, and responsiveness to affordances in episodes of unreflective action.

As part of his PhD-research project at the University of Amsterdam (UvA, 2003-2008), Erik studied cognitive science at the UvA and was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and Philosophy Department in 2005 and 2006. Since 2006 he has been part of Rietveld Landscape, an ambitious studio for landscape architecture that was founded by his brother and landscape architect Ronald Rietveld (see www.rietveldlandscape.com). Erik Rietveld is a member of the European Science Foundation’s ‘Eurocores’ project ‘Consciousness in a Natural and Cultural Context’. His papers have been accepted for publication by journals such as Inquiry, Theory & Psychology and Mind.

Sebastian Schleidgen

I am a PhD Student at the Interdepartmental Centre for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW) at the University of Tübingen (Germany), and a Fellow in Philosophy at Harvard in 2009-2010.

My primary research areas are in Normative Ethics, Meta-Ethics, Political Philosophy, Action and Decision Theory. In addition to my dissertation on “The Role of the Precautionary Principle for Implementing Sustainable Development,” I am especially interested in the relationship of descriptive and normative statements.

Please find further information about me at http://www.en.sebastian-schleidgen.de/.

Philipp Michelus

My primary research areas are in ethics and phenomenology. I am particularly interested in contemporary Kantian ethical theory, current research in Moral Psychology and, last but not least, Heidegger’s unwritten ethics. My doctoral research focuses on a Kantian theory of the sources of normativity as well as on questions of how a phenomenological understanding of self-consciousness modulates these sources.

Taking advantage of being in an Anglo-American country, I finally want to understand the roots and the development of the split between the so-called analytic and continental branches of philosophy.

Markus Rüther

I am a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Münster (Germany) and a Visiting Fellow in Philosophy at Harvard in 2010. My primary research areas are currently in Metaethics and Normative Ethics. I am particularly interested in contemporary analytic ethical theory (e.g., Gibbard, Gauthier, Korsgaard, Scanlon, Wiggins and McDowell) and the intersection with the Continental tradition (especially Kant and Hegel).

My PhD-research project is mainly concerned with the realism/anti-realism-debate in modern analytic philosophy and will be supported by the German National Academic Foundation with a scholarship for the next two years. More precisely, it focuses on a specific approach in metaethics, namely metaethcial non-cognitivism, and tries to outline the historical development and criticisms of these approaches (from Ayer, Stevenson, Hare to Gibbard and Blackburn). In this regard, I am also concerned with a systematic analysis of ethical naturalism in ethics and the theory of action as a background for non-cognitivism and antirealism in general.

As part of my PhD-research project, I was an Academic Visitor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Oxford and an Associate Member of Corpus Christi College during the last year (supervisor: John Broome).