awards
Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought Prizes
The Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought (BIAPT) has announced the winners of its Early Career and Mid-Career Prizes.
The prizes recognise scholars employed in Britain and Ireland who have made the greatest overall contribution to research and teaching in Political Thought at their respective career stages.
The Mid-Career Prize was awarded to Humeira Iqtidar (King’s College London). BIAPT writes:
One of the most exciting developments in the field in recent years has been the emergence and consolidation of comparative political theory, and Dr Iqtidar has been a central figure in this enterprise. Dr Iqtidar combines a genuine interdisciplinarity in her scholarship with publications in leading journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including Political Studies, the European Journal of Political Theory, the Journal of Politics, and Political Theory.
Dr Iqtidar’s research speaks to a number of academic audiences beyond political thought, including South Asian studies, sociology, and religious studies. Her monograph, Secularizing Islamists? Jama’at-e-Islami and Jama’at-ud-Da’wa in Urban Pakistan(University of Chicago Press, 2011) showcases the use of anthropological methods, with a striking dual argument at its core. Dr Iqtidar argues, first, that Islamism is an innovation in Islamic thought that emerged as a creative and oppositional response to colonial secularism. Second, she argues that, despite the Islamist critique of secularism, Islamists inadvertently support the secularisation of society by facilitating a qualitatively different imagination of religion.
Dr Iqtidar has continued to work on questions related to toleration and justice in recent Islamic thought, with due attention to the discursive effects of colonialism and its legacies. She is always working to broaden the range of sources we use for the serious study of political thought, mining sources that have often been historically overlooked.
In addition to her excellent scholarship and her teaching of comparative political theory, Dr Iqtidar is also a fine citizen of the broader research community, having founded the London Comparative Political Theory Group and sponsored the use of imaginative research methods through her work for the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Programme, as well as making significant editorial contributions. Dr Iqtidar has also served as academic convenor of the Association’s Political Thought Conference. She is a thoroughly deserving winner of the BIAPT Mid-Career Prize.
Humeira Iqtidar and Emily McTernan
The Early Career Prize was awarded to Emily McTernan (University College London). The prize announcement from BIAPT says:
Since defending her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2013, Dr McTernan has established herself as one of the most innovative and original early-career scholars working in contemporary political philosophy. Her research – much of which focuses on the meaning and implications of political equality – cuts across disciplinary boundaries, combining the rigorous philosophical analysis of moral and political concepts with attention to the methods and arguments found in the contemporary social sciences, including sociology and psychology.
Unlike much of the philosophical literature devoted to the concept of equality, Dr McTernan’s work looks beyond the juridical role of laws and institutions to consider instead the significance of norms and practices in facilitating and maintaining a genuinely social and relational egalitarianism. Her research has thus contributed not only to existing debates, but has also generated new discussions, by focusing normative philosophical attention on oft-ignored social and political concepts such as microaggressions.
In her forthcoming monograph, Dr McTernan develops her work on social equality further, to advance a pioneering conceptual account – and robust normative defence – of the phenomenon of ‘taking offence’. Dr McTernan argues that we should understand taking offence, under appropriate conditions, as a civic virtue rather than a vice, as an emotion that embodies the resistance of social inequalities within a community.
The publication of her writing in first-rank journals such as Philosophy & Public Affairs and The Journal of Political Philosophy, and its support through competitive funding awards by various bodies including The Leverhulme Trust and the Templeton Religion Trust, attest to its significance and international recognition.
As well as her highly original contributions to research in political theory, the BIAPT judges were very impressed by Dr McTernan’s excellence in teaching, demonstrated both by the testimonies of her departmental colleagues at UCL and the overwhelmingly positive feedback provided by her undergraduate and postgraduate students. The judges also appreciated her commitment to the political thought community, and her valued role as one of the academic convenors of the 2019 BIAPT annual conference.
The BIAPT was founded in 2008 and aims to represent and promote the study of all political thought found across academic disciplines, encompassing work in political science, philosophy, history, law, sociology, economics, cultural and literary studies. You can learn more about the organization here.
Philosophers Win Substantial ARC Early Career Awards
Several philosophy faculty are among the winners of Discovery Early Career Research Awards from the Australian Research Council (ARC).
They and their projects are:
- Guillermo Badia (University of Queensland)
Fuzzy logics for graded reasoning in applied contexts. Many things we care about, such as friendship or safety, come in degrees, but our current systems for tracking information are not built to handle this. This project aims to enhance many-valued logic as a tool to manage graded information. It expects to generate new knowledge in the area of logical languages for fuzzy databases and finite domains using an interdisciplinary approach between philosophers, mathematicians and computer scientists. Expected outcomes include new logical methods and modelling techniques for many-valued logics. This will provide significant benefits, such as the enhancement of fuzzy logic as a tool in artificial intelligence to handle reasoning with imprecise concepts, giving meaning to complex real-life data. (AU$356,000)
- Daniel Canaris (University of Sydney / Sun Yat-Sen University)
The Aristotelian Soul in Late Ming China. This project aims to uncover a seminal moment during the first stage of Sino-Western intellectual encounters when the Jesuit Francesco Sambiasi (1582-1649) collaborated with the mandarin Xu Guangqi (1562-1633) on the Lingyan lishao (1624), a Chinese translation of Aristotle’s On the Soul. Since Ming Chinese lacked direct analogues for the Aristotelian soul, this work provides significant insights into how conceptual translation is conducted between disparate cultures. The intended outcome of this project is to reveal the semantic transformations between the European and Chinese contexts. Benefits include the opening up of pioneering yet understudied texts and insights into why certain ideas fail to resonate in their new target culture. (AU$363,582)
- Luara Ferracioli (University of Sydney)
This project aims to assess the morality of ectogenesis, the process of gestating a foetus in an artificial womb. Recent technological advances in non-human ectogenesis raise the question of whether it is desirable to pursue research in human ectogenesis. This project expects to generate new knowledge in social philosophy by inquiring into the value of natural gestation, the foundations of parenthood, and the interests of foetuses during gestation. Expected outcomes of this project include an improved understanding of the costs, risks, and benefits of ectogenesis. This should provide significant benefits, such as resources for ethical decision-making in light of technologies aimed at radically reshaping the process of human creation. (AU$352,000)
- Doug McConnell (Oxford, but will take up the grant at Macquarie University)
This project aims to solve the philosophical problems of whether moral character motivates action and how it does so by developing an innovative account of moral character that draws on two overlooked bodies of research: the psychology of ‘moral identity’ and the philosophy of narrative self-constitution. The resulting narrative account of moral character claims that moral identities motivate moral action and, therefore, underpin moral character. The project then applies this knowledge to professional ethics, empirically testing the extent to which professional moral identities influence action and creating novel, self-narrative focused strategies to foster professional virtue. (AU $343,772)
- Helen Ngo (University of Queensland)
“No place like home? A phenomenology of racialised non-belonging.” Racism is a persistent problem in Australian society, yet its existential effects remain inadequately understood. This project aims to develop a new understanding of racism’s deep impact on one’s sense of self, and sense of place. The project seeks to use the emerging framework of critical phenomenology to illuminate different experiences of racialised non-belonging. Expected outcomes include an improved understanding of the ontological significance of feeling not at home in one’s environs, or in one’s own body. This expanded understanding will provide significant benefits by helping to motivate and guide more robust models of anti-racism in public life, leading to a more racially just society. (AU$ 416,000)
- Clas Weber (University of Western Australia)
This project aims to investigate the potential and the consequences of mind-uploading (i.e. transitioning a person from a biological hardware to an artificial one). It will use the methods of analytical philosophy to contribute to, and integrate, three different fields: philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and artificial intelligence. Expected outcomes include a theoretical and normative framework for mind-uploading, and a much-improved understanding of its implications. This should provide significant benefits, such as fostering exchange between philosophy and computer science, providing directions for scientific research and technological development, as well as informing legal guidelines for artificial intelligence development. (AU$352,000)
There were several other philosophically-related projects among the 196 approved for funding. You can see the full list of awardees here.
(via Samuel Baron)
New Canada Research Chairs in Philosophy
The government of Canada recently named 93 new Canada Research Chairs, and three of them are philosophers.
[Yabu Pushelberg, “Rua Ipanema Chair”]
They are:
- Kimberley Brownlee, Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political and Social Philosophy at the University of British Columbia
- Chike Jeffers, Canada Research Chair in Africana Philosophy at Dalhousie University
- Francesca Vidotto, Canada Research Chair in Foundations of Physics at Western University
The Canada Research Chairs program funds scholars to support “research excellence in engineering and the natural sciences, health sciences, humanities, and social sciences” and “improve our depth of knowledge and quality of life, strengthen Canada’s international competitiveness, and help train the next generation of highly skilled people through student supervision, teaching, and the coordination of other researchers’ work.”
You can see the full list of new and renewed chairs here.
APA Announces Prizes and Honors
The American Philosophical Association (APA) has announced the winners of several prizes and honors.
The awards and their winners are:
2021 K. Jon Barwise Prize: Ben Goertzel (SingularityNET)
The Barwise prize is awarded for “significant and sustained contributions to areas relevant to philosophy and computing by an APA member.” The prize is a plaque and a keynote talk at a computing and philosophy conference as well as a talk at one of the divisional APA meetings.
From the selection committee: “Though his educational background is in Mathematics and he is a towering figure in Artificial General Intelligence, Ben Goertzel’s patternist philosophy and its application to the mind binds together his philosophical and AI preoccupations, in particular the influence of C.S. Peirce. His theoretical works create the bridge between AI experts and the philosophers; in addition, they open up philosophical ideas to creative students in Computer Science and Mathematics.”
2022 de Gruyter Kant Lecture: Paul Guyer (Brown University)
The de Gruyter Lecture is intended “to promote and foster the Kantian legacy” in a way that is “open to a broad approach to Kantian philosophy across the philosophical disciplines.” The award includes a $1,500 honorarium plus travel expenses. The lecture is published in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association.
From the selection committee: “The selection committee was impressed by the depth and breadth of Professor Paul Guyer’s prodigious research on Kant across the span of his career. Professor Guyer’s nine books on Kant’s philosophy, his co-authored translations of Kant’s own works, and his insightful articles have helped Kant scholars deepen their understanding of Kant’s works and the modern period. The committee also appreciated that Professor Guyer helped to bring a range of other Kant scholars into view by editing six collections of essays on Kant’s works. Recognition of Professor Guyer’s important scholarly achievements has led to his being elected to be a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his election as President of the Eastern Division of the APA, and as President of the American Society for Aesthetics.”
2022 John Dewey Lectures
The Dewey Lectures are given at the three APA divisional meetings by “a prominent and senior (typically retired) philosopher associated with that Division, who is invited to reflect broadly and in an autobiographical spirit on philosophy in America as seen from the perspective of a personal intellectual journey.” It includes an honorarium of $1000. The lectures are published in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association.
Eastern: Christine Korsgaard (Harvard University)
From the selection committee: “Christine Korsgaard is an internationally renowned moral philosopher whose distinguished career has spanned more than four decades. Though moral philosophy and its history are her primary focus, her work touches on issues in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, moral psychology, and personal identity. In her teaching, she has mentored a number of students who have gone on to be prominent philosophers. She has spent time at institutions across the United States, most notably at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University. The Eastern Division is thus honored to have her share her perspective on philosophy in America at the 2022 Dewey Lecture.”
Central: Allan Gibbard (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
From the selection committee: “Allan Gibbard has been one of the world’s leaders in developing the metaethical view known as expressivism. During his long and distinguished career, almost entirely at the University of Michigan, he was at the core of a remarkable group of ethicists who trained generations of now-prominent moral philosophers. He served as the APA’s Central Division President, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.”
2021–2022 Edinburgh Fellowship: Ruth Boeker (University College Dublin)
The fellowship is at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. “There is no funding associated with this award, but the APA fellow has a private office in the Institute, is a member of the Institute’s lively research community, and has full borrowing rights at Edinburgh University Library.”
From the selection committee: “Ruth Boeker is an ideal choice for the APA Edinburgh Fellowship. Her project is to make a detailed study of women’s role in Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, including among others, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Ann Hepburn Arbuthno and Catharine Macaulay. Not only does the topic give her a clear rationale for pursuing that work in Edinburgh, it also connects up with the focus on digital humanities at the Institute for Advanced Studies and with the work of prominent historians of Philosophy in residence at the university.”
2022 Patrick Romanell Lecture: Louise Antony (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
The Romanell Lecture “is presented annually at a divisional meeting of the APA on the topic of philosophical naturalism.” It includes a $1,250 honorarium plus travel expenses. The lecture is published in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association.
From the selection committee: “Louise Antony is the 2022 Romanell Lecturer on philosophical naturalism. Throughout her career, Antony’s work in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of religion, and feminism has exhibited a commitment to naturalism. From issues of concept acquisition, mental causation, the nature of mental representation, and the relation between language and mind to considerations of gender and morality, Antony strives to solve philosophical problems from a methodological point of view that remains true to what we can know empirically about ourselves and the world around us.”
2022 Sanders Lecture: Ruth Millikan (University of Connecticut)
The Sanders Lecture, funded by the Marc Sanders Foundation, “is presented annually at a divisional meeting of the APA on a topic in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, or epistemology that engages the analytic tradition.” It includes a $3,500 honorarium plus travel expenses. The lecture is published in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association.
From the selection committee: “In 1984, the field of philosophy of mind was shaken by the publication of Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories. In this book, Dr. Ruth Garrett Millikan offered a promising approach to attempt to naturalize intentionality, with the additional bonus of being fully grounded in research on evolutionary biology. Her work helped to solidify teleological theories of mental content, and provided novel avenues to investigate the nature of mental representation. “Biosemantics,” a term with which she titled her influential 1989 paper in the Journal of Philosophy, is now part of the philosophers’ vernacular, as Dr. Millikan’s views have influenced the discipline well beyond the philosophy of mind, to fields such as epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of biology and neuroscience, to name just a few.”
You can learn more about the APA’s prizes here and here.
Philosophers Among the 2021 Newcombe Doctoral Fellows
The Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), has awarded its 2021 Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships, and several philosophy students are among the winners.
They are:
- Marzouq Alnusf (Northwestern University)
Global Racial Capitalism: How Race Matters to Global Justice - Shannon Brick (CUNY Graduate Center)
Rehabilitating Authenticity - Alex Steers-McCrum (CUNY Graduate Center)
What Does “Native” Mean? Disentangling and Decolonizing Settler Terms and Categories - Karolina Wisniewska (University of Arizona)
Identity, Inequality, Injustice
Marzouq Alnusf, Shannon Brick, Alex Steers-McCrum, Karolina Wisniewska
Mr. Steers-McCrum is the inaugural recipient of the Robert M. Adams–Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellow in Philosophy, co-named for philosopher Robert Merrihew Adams, the program’s co-founder.
The Newcombe Fellowships are awarded to Ph.D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences whose projects address “questions of ethical and religious values in interesting, original, or significant ways.” They fellows are provided with a 12-month award of $27,500 to support their final year of dissertation writing. You can see the full list of fellows here.
Philosophers Among New ACLS Fellows
Four philosophers have been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
They (and their projects) are:
- Renee Jorgensen Bolinger (currently at Princeton; will be at Harvard next year, and then Michigan)
- Rewriting Rights: Making Reasonable Mistakes in a Social Context
When agents make mistakes about whether they received consent, or whether they faced a threat that justified imposing defensive harm, a determination must be made about whether their mistake was reasonable. If it was, the mistake-maker are indemnified; if it wasn’t, they are held responsible. This book demonstrates that it is unjust to approach these determinations as a set of evaluations of individuals. It must instead be a social approach, characterizing what agents owe each other by reference to the norms that best coordinate the activity of the whole network of similarly situated people who aim to avoid making or suffering any mistakes. It develops a social signaling account of an appropriate coordination norm, and articulates the moral constraints that ensure such a norm will distribute the risks and costs of mistakes fairly, providing the content of what agents’ rights require of each other given our actual epistemic limitations.
- Rewriting Rights: Making Reasonable Mistakes in a Social Context
- Georgi Gardiner (Tennessee)
- She Said, He Said: Rape Accusations and the Balance of the Evidence
“She Said, He Said” investigates the epistemology of rape accusations, focusing on formal institutional procedures. ‘She said, he said’ cases are accusations of rape, followed by denials, with no further significant case-specific evidence, such as credible alibis or third-party witnesses. In such cases, probably the accusation is true. But this epistemic asymmetry underwrites a paradox. This paradox—which arises from the contrast between the relatively weak ‘preponderance’ standard and the characteristic epistemic strength of rape accusations—reveals tensions among plausible feminist and liberal commitments. Building on recent insights from philosophy and law, “She Said, He Said” challenges our understanding of testimony, proof, epistemic justice, and the epistemology of rape.
- She Said, He Said: Rape Accusations and the Balance of the Evidence
- Aminah Hasan-Birdwell (Columbia)
- The Consequences of War in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy: Ideas of Sustainable Peace in Elisabeth of Bohemia, Anne Conway, and Margaret Cavendish
This project focuses on the seventeenth-century philosophers Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618- 1680), Anne Conway (1631-1679), and Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) as they respond to the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War, conflicts whose political instability as well as economic and social devastation directly affected them. All three thinkers had distinct philosophical and moral responses to the wars of the seventeenth- century, but they agreed that war itself is not an inevitable condition and that its consequences outweigh its justifications or legitimacy. These key observations, among others, distinguished their thought from the prevalent theories of just war, which treated war as an essential aspect of the human condition.
- The Consequences of War in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy: Ideas of Sustainable Peace in Elisabeth of Bohemia, Anne Conway, and Margaret Cavendish
- Wendy Salkin (Stanford)
- Not Just Speaking for Ourselves
Informal political representatives (IPRs) are ubiquitous. They speak or act on behalf of others though neither elected nor selected by means of formal, systematized election or selection procedures. Familiar examples abound: Me Too’s Tarana Burke informally represents women who have experienced sexual assault or harassment. Black Lives Matter informally represents Black communities in the United States and beyond. IPRs play crucial roles in the lives of the represented, particularly when the represented are marginalized or oppressed. Though unelected, IPRs voice interests, make groups visible, and negotiate with lawmakers. Accordingly, IPRs can have significant power to influence how those they represent are regarded by a wide variety of audiences. Yet, IPRs’ power can, unchecked, put the represented in danger. Such unconstrained power generates unexpected duties for both IPRs and their audiences. “Not Just Speaking for Ourselves” provides a systematic normative theory of informal political representation.
- Not Just Speaking for Ourselves
The ACLS fellowships are for scholars working in the humanities and social sciences and consist of up to $60,000 to support six to twelve months of research. You can learn more about the fellowships here and see the entire list of fellowship recipients here.
(via Liz Jackson Withorn)
