2025 Dean's Summer Research Fellowship Recipient: Younghyun Hwang

Younghyun Hwang is a rising senior majoring in philosophy. He has been awarded the DSRF ($5000 grant) for his research project ‘Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Role of Reason in History’. In this project, he will compare how Nietzsche and Hegel assess the role of reason in bringing modernity. For Nietzsche, the overvaluation of reason is a cause for the impoverishment of human life in modernity. For Hegel, reason is a force of reconciliation which leads to the modern state. Yet both exhibit ambivalences. Nietzsche acknowledges the power of reason, and Hegel does not provide a merely optimistic picture of how the modern state came to be. The purpose of this project is to come up with a rigorous analysis of such details. Younghyun plans to expand this project into a senior thesis, further exploring the philosophical theme of the role of reason.  

Younghyun Hwang is working closely with Professor Henry Pickford with expertise in the field who will provide additional guidence and support, in the completion of his research.