Hildebrand Project

Summer Graduate Residency

The Summer Graduate Residency is a program designed to introduce graduate students to the thought of Dietrich von Hildebrand and other Christian personalists. It exists as an opportunity for graduate philosophy students to explore and engage the profound insights of Hildebrand as a personalist, an ethicist, and a realist phenomenologist.

During this summer graduate residency, participants will explore the major texts of Dietrich von Hildebrand, closely reading alongside our Senior Scholars, each of whom was a student of either Dietrich von Hildebrand or Karol Wojtyła. The residency culminates with the ability for graduate students to present their own work—dissertation chapters, conference papers, or graduate theses—and receive guidance from the Senior Scholars and other participants to hone the ideas, resulting in papers that will stand up to high-level academic scrutiny.

join the Summer 2023 Graduate Residency

Senior Scholars

Senior Scholar

John F. Crosby
Senior Scholar

Rocco Buttiglione
Senior Scholar

Josef Seifert
Senior Scholar

John F. Crosby

Franciscan University of Steubenville

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy

Research Areas:

Personalism, John Henry Newman, John Paul II, Dietrich von Hildebrand

Prof. Crosby was himself a student of Dietrich Hildebrand. Besides writing major studies on the thought of John Henry Newman, Max Scheler, and Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II, and making his own contributions to personalist philosophy, Prof. Crosby has devoted his long and distinguished academic career—first at the University of Dallas, then at the International Academy of Philosophy, and currently at Franciscan University of Steubenville—to introducing his students to the intellectual legacy of Hildebrand, and also to making Hildebrand better known in scholarly circles. Prof. Crosby was the translator of the English edition of  Hildebrand’s philosophical masterpiece, The Nature of Love, and he also serves as the General Editor of all our present and future translations of Hildebrand’s works.

Senior Scholar

Rocco Buttiglione

A trusted collaborator of Pope St. John Paul II, and is an authority on his philosophical anthropology. His book Karol Wojtyla: The Thought of the Man who became Pope John Paul II is a fundamental work on the pope’s early philosophy. A member of the Italian Parliament for over two decades, he serves on the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and holds the John Paul II Chair for Philosophy and History of European Institutions at the Lateran University in Rome. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Hildebrand Project.

Senior Scholar

Josef Seifert

Professor Seifert received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Salzburg in 1969 and, under Professor Robert Spaemann, his habilitation from the University of Munich (Privatdozent) in 1975. He studied chiefly under Balduin Schwarz, the most distinguished German former student of Dietrich von Hildebrand, at the University of Salzburg, and under Gabriel Marcel in Paris. Already as a child (from age 3 on) he knew Hildebrand personally, because Seifert’s mother had been a student of Hildebrand in Munich and both of his parents were Hildebrand’s friends. He is the author of many books, and Europe’s leading student and teacher of Hildebrand’s philosophy.

Eligibility

This program is open to all advanced philosophy and theology students, currently studying at the MA level or higher. While an academic focus on Hildebrand is the key condition for eligibility to attend the residency, the Hildebrand Project invites work that brings his thought into conversation with:

  • Philosophical traditions like analytic philosophy or phenomenology 
  • Specific contemporary issues in emotion theory, virtue ethics, aesthetics, etc. 
  • The intersection of faith and reason and the rehabilitation of reason in the sense of Wojtyla and Ratzinger 
  • The broader Catholic intellectual tradition, especially efforts to locate Hildebrand within this tradition 
  • Jewish, Protestant, and Orthodox philosophical and theological thought
Dietrich von Hildebrand sitting in office reading a paper

Summer 2022 Residency