Theda Rehbock Philosophy Residency 2025 Scholarship Awards

We are thrilled to announce the recipients of the prestigious Theda Rehbock Philosophy Residency 2025/26 scholarships.

I Prof. Dr. Katja Stoppenbrink

Professor of Ethics in the Social Professions at the Department of Applied Social Sciences at Munich University of Applied Sciences (Hochschule München HM)

Project: Ethics in Early Childhood Education – Towards a Principle-Based Framework for Educational Practice

During my residency at Susimetsa I will work on a systematic ethics of early childhood education, addressing a major gap in both applied ethics and childhood pedagogy. Grounded in educational philosophy and informed by empirical perspectives, my project relies on a principle-based approach that integrates fundamental moral concepts such as human dignity, human rights, and children’s rights. Extending beyond classical principles of non-maleficence, beneficence, justice, and respect for autonomy, it adds professional self-care, solidarity, and participation as key dimensions of professional ethics in early childhood education.
By linking these principles to pedagogical practice, the project explores ethical aspects of professional identity, educator–child–parent/guardian relationships, and institutional responsibility. Thus, I would like to contribute to establishing educational ethics as an independent field within early childhood education and strengthen ethical awareness in professional practice.

Residency Period: November 7^th – November 21^th 2025

II Dr. Jamie Davies

The Global Centre for Advanced Studies

Project: The Exhaustion (or Exhausting) of Being: A Study of Ontological Idleness

For the duration of my residency, I will be starting work on an extensive investigation into what I am provisionally calling the exhaustion, or exhausting, of Being. In the wake of the philosophical work of Giorgio Agamben and other contemporary thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas, and Byung-Chul Han, it is perhaps not impertinent to suggest that exhaustion, or idleness, is worthy of full ontological consideration. Thought in this manner, however, exhaustion would be a modality of existence which immanently brings ontology as operativity to a standstill, to its own sudden idleness. This is because the exhaustion of the actual, if positioned as an origin, cannot but stall the activity of being.

Devoid, therefore, of a subject to which being qua exhausted would be represented, the ‘is’ determining being from within an operative ontology would be only an exhausting (in the present participle); an exposing of the uselessness of being, not simply its purposelessness, but its pure mediality. To think being thus, as an exhausting, an emptying out of substance and effectivity, not only brings the productivity and activity of being to a halt, but it offers also the unique opportunity to consider the propensity for happiness that lies in what Walter Benjamin once called ‘authentic idleness;’ the idleness of a life which is not a work but its own exhausting exposure.

Residency Period: November 9^th – November 15^th 2025

III Sonja Schierbaum & Jon Bornholdt

Sonja Schierbaum from University of Würzburg & Jon Bornholdt from University of Würzburg

Project: Acting in a Contingent World: Probability and Moral certainty in early German Enlightenmentbility as a new principle of biomedical ethics

We intend to use the fellowship to develop our applications for further research projects based on our current work on practical reasons before Kant (1720–1780). The overall topic derives from the fact that, in the early German Enlightenment, although many of the traditional metaphysical assumptions were no longer regarded as absolutely or demonstratively certain, they were still needed in many areas—such as ethics—as grounding assumptions. The loss of demonstrative certainty thus called for the development of a new kind of certainty based on probability and probable cognition, namely moral certainty. Our aim is to provide a more comprehensive picture of how philosophers in the early German Enlightenment conceived of the requirements for practical deliberation as a basis for moral action in a world that no longer admitted absolute certainty and therefore required new ways of securing the possibility of morally evaluable action.

Residency Period: March 30^th – April 10^th, 2026

Other scholarship recipients will be announced here soon.