The Association for Symbolic Logic has awarded its 2022 Shoenfield Logic Book and Article Prizes. The Shoenfield Prizes are “awarded for outstanding expository writing in the field of logic” and were established honor the late Joseph R. Shoenfield, a influential logician who died in 2000. The Shoenfield Book Prize was awarded to Paolo Mancosu (University of California, Berkeley), Sergio Galvan (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart), and Richard Zach (Calgary) for their book, An Introduction to Proof Theory—Normalization, Cut-Elimination, and Consistency Proofs (Oxford University Press, 2021). Here’s a summary of their book: Proof theory is a central area of mathematical logic of special interest to philosophy. It has its roots in the foundational debate of the 1920s, in particular, in Hilbert’s program in the philosophy of mathematics, which called for a formalization of mathematics, as well as for a proof, using philosophically unproblematic, “finitary” means, that these systems are free from contradiction.
Awards Grants Honors
The Journal of the History of Philosophy has awarded its 2022 best article prize to Karolina Hübner (Cornell). Professor Hübner won the prize, which recognizes the best article published in the journal in 2022, for her, “Representation and Mind-Body Identity in Spinoza’s Philosophy“. Here’s the abstract of the article: The paper offers a new reading of Spinoza’s claim that minds and bodies are “one and the same thing,” commonly understood as a claim about the identity of a referent under two different descriptions. This paper proposes instead that Spinoza’s texts and his larger epistemological commitments show that he takes mind-body identity to be (1) an identity grounded in an intentional relation, and (2) an identity of one thing existing in two different ways. The prize comes with an award of $1500. A list of previous winners of the award can be found here. (via Deborah Boyle)
The European Research Council (ERC) recently announced the winners of their sizable “Consolidator Grants,” and several philosophers were among them. They are: A.J. Cotnoir (University of St Andrews) “Instruments of Unity: the Many Ways of Being One” We perceive unities everywhere: from ant colonies to cellular automata, from organisms to organisations. Yet we have little understanding of the general constraints by which they are unified. The Instruments of Unity Project tackles this abstract question in a way that provides concrete applicable answers. The core hypothesis: unity is a complex pluralistic phenomenon, requiring a multifaceted theoretical approach. We identify unity relations across a variety of formal settings in a way that is receptive to insights and tools from the cognitive and computing sciences, even addressing the ‘meta-question’ as to whether there’s any unity to the different types of unity. We plan to apply the resulting framework to problems in metaphysics, social ontology, and formal ontology.
The Royal Institute of Philosophy (RIP) has announced the creation of a new book prize to recognize “the most original philosophical research that transcends academic disciplines”. The prize comes with a monetary award of £20,000 (≈ $24,600). The Nayef Al-Rodhan International Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy will aim to reward the authors of books that, according to a press release from the RIP, demonstrate rigorous original and high-quality transdisciplinary research are accessible and engaging to read are original, innovative, and impactful intend to advance and contribute to the understanding of human behaviors. They add: We welcome philosophical work that transcends academic boundaries, and furthers our understanding of the key challenges facing the world today, and that may face us in the future. The work may be from philosophers, neuroscientists, social scientists, or from other disciplines. Among other work we welcome submissions from those researching disruptive technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, from those concerned with climate change, and from those concerned with the future of democracy.
Symposium: The Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy has announced the winners of its 2022 Book Award. The award aims to recognize books in Continental philosophy, taking into account originality and importance to its subfield. Typically only one book wins the award, but this year, three have. They are: Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World (Rowman & Littlefield) by Ian Angus (Simon Fraser University) Anxiety: A Philosophical History (Oxford University Press) by Bettina Bergo (University of Montreal) Hermeneutics as Critique: Science, Politics, Race, and Culture (Columbia University Press) by Lorenzo C. Simpson (State University of New York, Stony Brook) Symposium is the journal of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy (CSCP). You can see a list of previous winners of its Book Award here.
The 2020-21 Mark Blaug Prize in Philosophy and Economics has been awarded to Malte Dold and Alexa Stanton (Pomona College) for their paper, “I Choose for Myself, Therefore I Am: The Contours of Existentialist Behavioral Economics“. The Blaug Prize is awarded by the Erasmas Journal for Philosophy and Economics (EJPE) and is intended to promote and reward the work of junior scholars in philosophy and economics. The prize is named for Mark Blaug (1927–2011), a founder of the field of philosophy and economics. The prize includes a cash sum of 500 Euros. Malte Dodd is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Pomona College in California. Previously, he spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at New York University. He holds a master’s degree in Philosophy and Economics from the University of Bayreuth, and received his PhD in Economics from the University of Freiburg. Alexa Stanton graduated from Pomona College magna cum laude in 2020, with a major in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE), and a minor in Computer Science.
Elliott Sober, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, is the winner of the first Philosophy in Biology and Medicine (PhilInBioMed) Award. The award, which will be given annually, recognizes “outstanding contributions to the advancement of biology or medicine through the use of philosophical and theoretical tools”. It is awarded by PhilInBioMed (previously), an interdisciplinary institute located at the University of Bordeaux, France, and its associated national and international network of interdisciplinary teams. The winner receives €5,000 and delivers a lecture at a ceremony at the University of Bordeaux. For further details visit the PhilInBioMed site.
A project led by philosophers Mathias Frisch and Torsten Wilholt (Institut für Philosophie at Leibniz Universität Hannover) on science and trust has received a 4,020,000 million euro grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG). The project, “Social Credibility and Trustworthiness of Expert Knowledge and Science-Based Information” (SOCRATES), “aims to investigate the philosophical preconditions that are relevant to trust in knowledge and scientific credibility in general [and the] processes through which scientific expertise can be undermined,” according to an announcement from the DFG. A press release from Leibniz Universität Hannover, where the project will be based, says: SOCRATES intends to tackle the challenge of understanding how science can continue to serve as a source of shared knowledge that not only enjoys trust but actually earns it. The group will investigate philosophical requirements relevant for trust in science.
Philosopher Nathan Ballantyne (Arizona State University) and psychologist Norbert Schwarz (University of Southern California) have won a $3.4 million grant for their project, “Humility in Inquiry”. “The project focuses on humility in inquiry—the practices and processes that encourage humble, open-minded thinking,” says Professor Ballantyne. “The project’s aim is to support intensive collaborations between philosophers and scientists, and ultimately to establish a new paradigm of interdisciplinary research.” The grant supporting the research was awarded by the John Templeton Foundation. Professors Ballantyne and Schwarz will in turn be distributing subawards totaling $1.3 million. These will support research by multidisciplinary teams with members drawn from philosophy, psychological science, and related fields to address one or more of the themes of “Applying Epistemic Ideals, Science and Organizations, and Mindsets and Metacognitive Perspectives”.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced the recipients of their latest round of grants, and a number of philosophers are among the winners. They and their projects are: Jacob Beck (York University) Minds without Language: Research and writing leading to a book offering a pluralistic account of the processes of human thought informed by cognitive science. $60,000 Jeffrey Brower (Purdue University) Aquinas on Space and Spatial Location: Research and writing leading to a book on philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas’s (1225–1274) theories on motion, space, and location. $60,000 Stephen Darwall (Yale University) Modern Moral Philosophy After Kant: Research and writing leading to a book on the history of moral philosophy from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. $60,000 Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern University) Epistemic Reparations: Research and writing leading to a book on the rights of victims to epistemic justice by being known and heard by the parties who wronged them.