Bowman Wins Humboldt

Brady Bowman, assistant professor of philosophy at Penn State, has been selected as a recipient of the Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers, among the most prestigious and generous academic awards in Germany, to pursue research on the metaphysics of value and the concept of the good in German Idealism.  

“I’m elated,” said Prof. Brady, “The Humboldt Fellowship is an honor in itself, but it’s also a great opportunity to renew my working relationship with colleagues in Germany and to get my new book project underway.”

By invitation of Prof. Birgit Sandkaulen, he will spend the academic year of 2014/15 at the newly founded Forschungszentrum für Klassische Deutsche Philosophie (Center for the Study of Classical German Philosophy) at the University of Bochum.

Professor Bowman’s research will address the thought of major historical figures including (among others) Spinoza, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and will center on the concept of life and its ramifications for a realist theory of value, the prospects for non-theistic forms of religious thought, and the nature and existential value of philosophy as a form of knowledge.  

The project’s guiding thesis is that the metaphysical framework of reductive naturalism is basically inhospitable to the human commitment to the reality of value and that post-Kantian German philosophy continues to represent a viable alternative to contemporary forms of naturalism.

Professor Bowman has published widely on German philosophy after Kant; his monograph Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013.