The following post is written by Honors Professor Mark Ralkowski. —
Two UHP seniors who are majors in the philosophy department, Iaan Reynolds and Katie Hurrelbrink, are publicly defending their theses Friday, May 3 in Phillips 411, from 2:00 until 4:00. They will each present their work for twenty minutes, and then answer tough questions from faculty for ten minutes. The Philosophy Dept. is also holding a reception for them afterward. This is very exciting for everyone in the department because Katie and Iaan both received fellowships to write their theses.
Along the same lines, Iaan has had some success with his research. He recently published part of his thesis in an international undergraduate journal called Paideia. His article is called “Motivating and Imagining an Ethics of Adjacency.” This is his abstract:
Heidegger gives us a compelling reason to reject metaphysics entirely. Upon a close examination of metaphysical inquiry, Heidegger arrives at a troubling conception of ontology. To Heidegger, ontological inquiries can only take place under certain ‘ontotheologies’, which are shared understandings of what and how beings are. While most of Heidegger’s project can be read as an attempt to do ontology despite this major obstacle, he remains strangely silent on the question of ethics. Here I formulate the first piece of a Heideggerian ethics, based on the ‘fundamental ontology’ he writes in Being and Time and elsewhere.
