Stephanie M. Takata-Struble

I received my Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stony Brook University in 2026. From 2023-2024, I lived in Germany and was a visiting scholar at the Universität zu Köln’s Husserl Archive. Prior to my graduate work, I lived and worked in Japan as an Assistant Language Instructor with the Japanese Exchange Teaching (JET) Program.

My research examines the ways in which values and emotions orient us toward the world. My dissertation (After Ressentiment: Morality, Values, and Transformation) focuses on the reactive, negative value relationship known as ressentiment. I developed an account of ressentiment as a pattern of moral experience to which everyone is potentially vulnerable, and which involves placing higher values below easily obtainable lower values. I use this framework to analyze contemporary phenomena such as racism and misogyny, challenging the idea that only those who are weak or already marginalized can experience ressentiment.   

In addition to my work on ressentiment, I have published two articles that examine our relationships with non-human animals. In “Loving Beyond the Human” (published by Between the Species) I integrate my work on values with my interest in non-human animals. I contend that normative theories that argue for the moral consideration of animals have limited efficacy because they do not always challenge our fundamentally anthropocentric values, which place human interests over those of the nonhuman. I examine ways in which human relationships with nonhuman animals are often harmful, even and especially in those cases where we profess to love nonhuman animals. This is because our love is often constrained by anthropocentric aims or anthropomorphic conceptions of what is good. My other article, “The Environment of Ideality” (published by The Owl of Minerva), is situated within the Hegelian tradition and examines the role of the environment in the development of the soul, a precursor to Spirit. Drawing on Hegel’s analysis of the cry in human infants, I broaden his notion of the soul to account for the distinctive place of companion animals (“pets”) as animals that live within human society and thus within an environment that distinguishes them from other animals. I argue that the vocalizations of companion animals differ from those of animals in a natural environment because they are addressed to an interested, human caretaker on whom they depend. This demonstrates a much greater range of capacities than Hegel attributed to animals, underscores the importance of sociality and intersubjectivity to their development, and opens up the question of whether we ought to think and act differently in relation to them.