Claus Wisser Postdoctoral Programme, funded by a generous donation from the late Claus Wisser, carried out in cooperation with the Pro Universitate Foundation, and directed by Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst and Prof. Dr. Nicole Deitelhoff

Duration of stay: October 2024 – July 2025

Luca Hemmerich recently submitted his dissertation, entitled “The Concept of Interest. An Objectivist Reconception”, supervised by Dirk Jörke at TU Darmstadt. He was a doctoral student and research assistant at the Department of Political Theory and History of Ideas at TU Darmstadt from 2020 to 2024. He previously studied social sciences, mathematics and political theory in Bielefeld, Frankfurt and Darmstadt. Stays abroad during his doctorate and master’s degree took him to Oxford, Lancaster and the New School for Social Research. His current research project “Institutions for the Future of Democracy” is dedicated to the growing ecological crisis, which is one of the most pressing challenges facing democracy today. The project is based on the assumption that current liberal-democratic institutions are ill-prepared for this crisis due to systemic reasons. Accordingly, an appropriate response to the ecological crisis requires a structural change to existing democratic institutions. The focus here is particularly on the question of how the interests of future generations and non-human nature can be adequately taken into account in political institutions.

Selected Publications:
Forthcoming. Intergenerational Domination. The Journal of Ethics.
2024. Against Negativism: Why Critical Theory Should Appeal to the Good. Political Philosophy 1 (1), pp. 105–127.
2023. Trivially Satisfied Desires: A Problem for Desire-Satisfaction Theories of Well-Being. Utilitas 35 (4), pp. 277–291.
2021. Politische Anthropologie und Anthropologiekritik. Der Platz des Menschen im politischen Denken heute. Zeitschrift für Politik 2021 (4), pp. 406–422, (with Dirk Jörke).