Andrew Werner ’10 recently became one of only 21 students nationwide to win the prestigious Beinecke Scholarship. A $34,000 scholarship that will provide financial support toward his graduate studies, the program was established in 1971 to honor three brothers. One hundred colleges and universities nation-wide are invited each year to nominate a student planning to attend graduate school in the arts, humanities and social sciences for this award.
Although Werner, a philosophy major, has not yet applied to graduate school, he hopes to study philosophy or social thought at the University of Chicago.
Werner was first introduced to European philosophy through his high school debate team. “I think debate is the best educational experience that high school students in the U.S. have,” he said. “Prior to coming to college, I read hundreds of law reviews, which is fairly uncommon. I was blessed to have the opportunity to participate in [debate].” This love for debate has stayed with Werner, who is now a debate coach and plans to work at multiple debate camps this summer.
In his studies, Werner “[wants] to examine the unity between our epistemology and our ethics through studying people like Hegel.” Though the College’s philosophy department does not offer many classes on this subject, Werner has studied Hegel’s work independently and taken some related classes in Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought (LJST) and Political Science. The scholarship, and consequently graduate school, will offer him greater opportunity to study Hegel and other philosophers of interest in depth.
When he found out he won the scholarship, he “was extremely happy. [He] called [his] parents and went and thanked all the professors who wrote [him] recommendations.”
“Andrew Werner is one of those rare students who combines enormous intellectual energy with deep discipline,” said Political Science Chair Thomas Dumm. “The philosopher Stanley Cavell once said that there are two kinds of thinkers — those who pretend to have read almost nothing, so as to get to the heart of things, and those who pretend to have read almost everything, so as to do the same. Andrew’s very much in the latter camp. As a first year student he took an advanced seminar in contemporary political theory, and seemed to have read everything for the course before we began. Not only that, but secondary work on the primary thinkers, relevant earlier figures in the history of thought, and so on. He really is a phenomenon.”
Assistant Professor of LJST Adam Sitze echoed Dumm’s sentiments. “Andy is one of those students who combines laser-beam focus and razor-sharp attention to detail with a memory like a steel trap,” he said. “He’s just as skilled at ethical reasoning as he is at logical analysis. He’s also someone with a fierce desire to study philosophic texts in a close, systematic and serious way. To put it in musical terms, I’m convinced that when Andy reads a given philosopher, he doesn’t merely hear a series of movements — a memorable overture here, a catchy prelude there. No, he hears the whole symphony, its full blast and silence. What’s more, Andy has an amazing ability to hold together that concord and discord in his mind: he’s got an amazing ability, that is, to grasp philosophic systems in their entirety, to rotate them around on their axes, to consider them from different angles, to think their parts not only in relation to the whole, but also in relation to what’s absent from the whole. I’ve learned a lot from Andy these past years, and I’m grateful for the chance to have shared a classroom with him.”