Fulbrights, Honors Come to Increasingly Prominent Philosophy Department

Two graduate students have been selected as Fulbright recipients from the same department—a first for the University. These two are joined by four other graduate philosophy students receiving prestigious awards for study abroad.

“We consider it an amazing year in terms of national and international awards,” said Dr. Ronald Polansky, department chair.

It’s all because of the prominence of the philosophy department in academic circles. “I chose Duquesne University for my graduate studies because its graduate program in philosophy has a reputation for being strong in the history of philosophy, particularly in German philosophy,” explained Martin Krahn, one of the 2015-2016 Fulbright winners.

The program promotes an emphasis on contemporary and ancient language as well as philosophy, with students working hard to ramp up language skills regardless of fluency levels, Polansky said. “Because the program is focused on continental thought, it seems you need requisite learning in the language,” Polansky said. ‘We think that this, in addition to good philosophical study, is helping them get these awards.”

The award winners are:

Krahn received a Fulbright supporting the study of the relationship between metaphysics and physics in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy of nature at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern in Germany from mid-September to mid-July 2016. He will study the fabric of nature vs. nurture in Hegel’s thinking. Krahn has been in Germany since March and will stay through July as part of an existing faculty and graduate student exchange program between Duquesne and the University of Heidelberg.

Paul Zipfel’s Fulbright supports the study of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, specifically the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. He will look at the ways people find themselves surrounded by others for whom they feel an ethical obligation—or the ability to act unethically toward them. After a month of language studies in Nantes, France, Zipfel will study at the Husserl Archives at the University of Cologne from September through August 2016.

Italian native Alessio Rotundo is one of only 15 Chateaubriand Fellows selected by the French government. This spring, he will study at the Husserl Archives in Paris, a research hub of the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique. Rotundo will critically evaluate Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on biological nature and the place of human beings within nature.

Bethany Somma received a three-year research fellowship from the Munich School of Ancient Philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany. Starting in October she will begin work there to produce her doctoral dissertation on late antique Greek and classical Arabic philosophy. Somma is tracing the development of non-rational notions—for example, desire and animals—to show how they are important to philosophy and human flourishing.

Native Canadian Tristana Martin-Rubio is in Berlin, thanks to a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst to attend an intensive, eight-week language course at the Goethe Institute to further study the German language. She also studied at the institute last year through a previous Summer Language Grant. Martin-Rubio’s doctoral work at Duquesne will focus on phenomenology, which is the nature of reality and our experiences, as related to space, time and the body. Her studies are supported by the most elite award for Canadians studying at international institutions and one of the top doctoral awards in Canada: a four-year, $20,000 CAD Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship, received in 2014.

Aaron Higgins-Brake, also from Canada, is another SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship winner who chose to study at Duquesne. He will focus on Plotinus’ philosophy of the self, individual happiness and understanding of the world at large.