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.
prize
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 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.
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.
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.
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.