Email This PageDaniel Koltonski ’02
Daniel Koltonski ’02 was recently selected by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation to be a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow for 2008. The Newcombe Fellowship is “the nation’s largest and most prestigious award of its kind for Ph.D. students, addressing ethical and religious questions in the humanities and social sciences.” It awards $23,000 to each fellow for 12 months of dissertation work. Koltonski, who graduated from Swarthmore with high honors in philosophy, is a doctoral student at Cornell University. His dissertation Political Obligation in a Democracy analyzes the protective and destructive powers of the law in relation to individual freedom, arguing as follows: “We have a basic duty to respect each other’s freedom, the fulfillment of which requires authoritative law as a tool; but we can only prevent others from using this tool instead to endanger our freedom by achieving a genuinely democratic community.”
