A project is underway to study self-control in contexts of poverty in the Global South, directed by professor of philosophy Juan Pablo Bermúdez (Universidad Externado de Colombia & Imperial College London). The project is supported by a $300,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Professor Bermúdez provides the following description of it: Research suggests that poverty reduces our ability to pursue long-term goals, but it is yet unclear how this effect occurs. Does poverty make temptations greater, and self-control failures more frequent? Or do agents respond to poverty’s harsher conditions by abandoning their longterm aspirations, choosing shorter-term goals instead? To our knowledge there is no direct test of these two possible mechanistic explanations. Using a method that allows us to take ‘psychological snapshots’ of everyday experiences, we will map out the influence of context on people’s decision-making process, in order to better understand the mechanisms of self-control in contexts of poverty. Our study will include the most diverse population yet in self-control studies: people from high and low SES backgrounds in urban Colombia.
Awards Grants Honors
Last year, the Department of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, created a Center for Philosophy and Children (see this post). Now the Center has won a $250,000 grant to support its programs. The grant will support the Center for Philosophy and Children’s residential summer philosophy program for high school students. The program includes scholarships for all of the participants that covers tuition, room and board, and transportation. The Center also provides assistance to summer program participants during the school year to help them with the college application process. Besides the summer program, the Center facilitates the Philosophy in Public Schools program, which sends undergraduates, graduate students, and professors into public schools in Western Massachusetts to explore philosophical concepts with children. It also has plans to train school teachers to bring philosophy programs into the classroom. The grant is from the “Knowledge for Freedom” program of the Teagle Foundation. The Center for Philosophy and Children is co-directed by Julia Jorati and Ned Markosian. You can learn more about it here.
The Marc Sanders Foundation has announced the winners of its 2022 Early Modern Philosophy Prize and its 2022 Philosophy of Mind Prize. The Early Modern Philosophy Prize was awarded to Gabriel Watts, a graduate student at the University of Sydney, for his “Hume’s Gambit: Irreligion, Animals, and Truth”. Here’s the abstract of the paper: In this paper I develop an irreligious reading of Hume’s decision to return to philosophy after his sceptical crisis at the end of Book One of A Treatise of Human Nature. Any irreligious reading of Hume’s epistemology must articulate Hume’s epistemic grounds for preferring his experimental science of human nature to sophisticated superstitious anthropologies. I argue that Hume believes his use of animal analogies to confirm his hypotheses offers him the best possible “security” against positing false causal claims about the nature of our “mental operations”, and that the superior security of this experimental method of reasoning provides him with epistemic grounds for preferring his science of human nature to superstitious metaphysics, even though both have title to our assent.
Two philosophers were given honorary titles as part of the UK’s 2023 New Year Honours, which recognize people who have “made achievements in public life [and] committed themselves to serving and helping the UK”. John Finnis (Oxford, Notre Dame) was named a “Commander of the Order of the British Empire” for “services to Legal Scholarship”. Edward Harcourt (Oxford, Arts and Humanities Research Council) was named a “Member of the Order of the British Empire” for “services to Interdisciplinary Research”. You can check out the full list of those honored here.
The Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy (BIAP) has been awarded the María de Maeztu Prize by the Spanish government’s Ministry of Science and Innovation. The prize includes official recognition for BIAP as a “unit of excellence” and a €2 million (approximately $2.12 million) grant to support its research over the next five years. BIAP was the only institute in the humanities in Spain to have been awarded a María de Maeztu prize this year. BIAP is comprised of researchers from the University of Barcelona, the University Pompeu Fabra, and the University of Girona, and the project will involve researchers at all three institutions. The research program the prize will support is on the nature and role of evidence. It aims to: 1. explore and systematize the different roles, and scope, assigned to evidence in a variety of well-defined contexts of enquiry, 2. develop a coherent overall conception of the nature of evidence, and of evidential support, across the aforementioned contexts of enquiry, synthesizing the results obtained in pursuit of the first principal research objective, and 3.
The Journal of the History of Philosophy (JHP) has announced the winner of its 2022 Book Prize. The prize, awarded for the best book written in history of philosophy published in 2021, goes to Arthur Ripstein (university of Toronto) for his Kant and the Law of War (Oxford University Press, 2021). Here’s the publisher’s description of the book: The past two decades have seen renewed scholarly and popular interest in the law and morality of war. Positions that originated in the late Middle Ages through the seventeenth century have received more sophisticated philosophical elaboration. Although many contemporary writers appeal to ideas drawn from Kant’s moral philosophy, his explicit discussions of war have not yet been brought into their proper place in these debates.
Kojin Karatani, a Japanese philosopher and literary theorist, has been selected as 2022 winner of the $1 million Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture.
Jennifer Morton, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, has been selected as the winner of the 2022 Grawemeyer Award in Education. Professor Morton was recognized for the ideas put forward in her 2019 book, Moving Up without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility (Princeton University Press). The Grawemeyer Awards, administered by the University of Louisville, “pays tribute to the power of creative ideas, emphasizing the impact a single idea can have on the world.” Bestowed in several fields, each award includes a prize of $100,000. From the award announcement: The dream of achieving success by attending college is deeply flawed for some, says Morton, a first-generation college student who left Peru to attend Princeton.
The American Philosophical Association (APA) has announced which projects will be funded during the 2022-23 academic year by its Diversity and Inclusiveness Grant Program and its Small Grant Program. The APA’s Diversity and Inclusiveness Grant Program each year has up to $20,000 to fund “one or two projects aiming to increase the presence and participation of women, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, people of low socioeconomic status, and other underrepresented groups at all levels of philosophy.” This year, the grant-funded projects are: The Lavender Library: Institutionalizing Access to Queer Theory, Courses and Speakers at a Regional Comprehensive University in the South ($10,000) According to the Public Religion Research Institute, Arkansans are the least supportive of measures to protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination compared to all states (3/26/19).
The American Philosophical Association (APA) has announced the winners of 14 of its prizes. Below are the prizes and their winners (and when available, comments from the judges): 2022 Article Prize — for the best, published article by a younger scholar in the previous two years ($2000) Sarah Moss (University of Michigan), “Pragmatic Encroachment and Legal Proof” (Philosophical Issues, 2021) From the selection committee: In “Pragmatic Encroachment and Legal Proof” Sarah Moss argues that the issue of pragmatic encroachment, or the degree to which one’s belief constitutes knowledge given the consequences of acting upon that belief, raises a fundamental problem regarding American trial procedure. If pragmatic factors can matter to knowledge possession the question of whether the standard of legal proof, i.e. knowledge, is met by a particular jury in a criminal trial may depend, crucially, on what is at stake. Here, Moss contends, lies the problem. For relevant stakes in criminal trials include the consequences to be faced by the defendant if found guilty—yet this information is typically withheld from jurors in criminal trials.