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.