Congratulations to Owen Ware for receiving the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. As a result, he is currently a fellow at the Center for Post-Kantian Philosophy at Potsdam University for the 2026 summer semester as well as for 2027.
This summer he is working on a new project about how the problem of evil was transformed in the philosophical and literary traditions of late Romanticism. He describes his project this way:
“In the first decades of the nineteenth century, some of the greatest philosophical and literary works of the age attempted to solve the problem of how the evils, ills, and injustices of the world are compatible with belief in an all-good, all-wise, and all-powerful God. My project traces how the competing traditions of late Romanticism in England and Germany arose from earlier debates over the nature of freedom, responsibility, and the limits of reason, and makes a case for the revival of tragedy as a key for justifying God in light of human suffering.
What I am to uncover is the shared intellectual currents that animate the work of Kant, Goethe, Byron, Mary Shelley, Schelling, Coleridge, and Wordsworth—figures rarely brought into conversation with each other. I show how their struggle with the problem of evil created deep rifts in the landscape of late Romanticism, forming radically different conceptions of God and the highest good. Yet I argue that the late Romantics were still committed to a common aim, to uphold visions of profound hope, even if those visions force us to confront the darker side of ourselves.”
Another area that Ware will study concerns how the concept of community developed among philosophers after Kant as a way of rethinking freedom and human agency. Finally, his most recent book was also published this year, Novalis’s ‘Heinrich von Ofterdingen’: A New Translation and Critical Study, by Cambridge University Press.