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.
Philosophy
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.
“There is room to think creatively about how to improve learning and love of philosophy via innovation in pedagogy.” That’s Russell Marcus, professor of philosophy at Hamilton College, and Catherine Schmitt, an undergraduate at Hamilton studying philosophy and neuroscience, writing about the experiments in philosophy teaching they’ve facilitated as part of the Hamilton College Summer Program in Philosophy (HCSPiP). In the following guest post, they share some observations about successful philosophy teaching innovations, and invite readers to share their own. What Do Experiments in Philosophy Teaching Look Like? by Russell Marcus and Catherine Schmitt We often think of innovations in our philosophy teaching in terms of introducing new content. Student learning, though, may depend as much on how we teach as it does on what we teach. Moreover, since few of our undergraduate philosophy students will continue on to graduate work, and since philosophy departments are widely under pressure to justify our curricula and classes, attention to improving the classroom experiences of our students is essential.
Valiant attempts have been made to measure happiness and wellbeing. People much smarter than me have developed fancy indices, and people even smarter than that, such as our own Nicholas Gruen, has called bullshit on many of them. What I … Continue reading
One question for Jon Rueda, a doctoral student in moral philosophy at the University of Granada.
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“Philosophical inquiry thrives when it is conducted in a spirit that risks overreaching a bit,” yet “the current incentive structure of academic philosophy in the United States favors cautious and modest research agendas for early career philosophers.” The journal Axiomathes is becoming Global Philosophy, and in a forthcoming editorial about the change, John Symons (Kansas) discusses a variety of obstacles to global philosophy. “Deglobalization” and the resurgence of nationalism is one kind obstacle, he says, but so is hyperspecialization and the pressure to conform to narrow disciplinary standards. Here’s the passage from which the above quotes were excerpted: In the decades prior to the financial crisis of 2008, when Anglo-American philosophy departments were relatively financially healthy, a narrowly defined research niche in a fashionable topic could provide easy rewards in the early career of a young philosopher. With cleverness (or a good advisor in graduate school) one’s work could be crafted to satisfy the preferences of a manageably small number of specialists. Their approval was a necessary condition for professional advancement.
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.