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.
Philosophy
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.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a visiting professor at Morehouse College in the early 1960’s.* While there, he taught a senior seminar in social and political philosophy. What was on the syllabus? Here’s his outline for the first semester of the course, from the King Center: He includes material from Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Bentham, and Mill. Here is an exam given in the course: Thanks to various readers and tweeters for bringing this to my attention. Readers may be interested in the forthcoming collection, To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, edited by Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry (Harvard). Shelby and Terry discussed the book and King’s political philosophy on WBUR’s “Radio Boston” yesterday. (*Morehouse says the course took place in 1960; the King Center says 1961-62. The exam’s date of January 25, 1962, suggests the course began in Fall 1961.) [This post was originally published in 2018.]
Philosopher Nathan Ballantyne (Arizona State University) and psychologist Norbert Schwarz (University of Southern California) have won a $3.4 million grant for their project, “Humility in Inquiry”. “The project focuses on humility in inquiry—the practices and processes that encourage humble, open-minded thinking,” says Professor Ballantyne. “The project’s aim is to support intensive collaborations between philosophers and scientists, and ultimately to establish a new paradigm of interdisciplinary research.” The grant supporting the research was awarded by the John Templeton Foundation. Professors Ballantyne and Schwarz will in turn be distributing subawards totaling $1.3 million. These will support research by multidisciplinary teams with members drawn from philosophy, psychological science, and related fields to address one or more of the themes of “Applying Epistemic Ideals, Science and Organizations, and Mindsets and Metacognitive Perspectives”.
Reminder: if you are running a summer program or summer school in philosophy, there is a place to list it to make it more visible to potentially interested parties. If you’re running a summer program in philosophy for graduate students or recent PhDs, list it in the comments here. If you’re running a summer program in philosophy for undergraduates, list it in the comments here. If you’re running a summer program in philosophy for high school students, list it in the comments here. Everyone else: if you know students who might be interested in these programs, please pass along the relevant post(s). Thanks!
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.
If a society consisted of human beings who had been partly engineered or edited, would we think about human life in the same way or would we lose a sense of reciprocity with others?
‘They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence’, rasps Kyle Reese in The Terminator, referring to the Skynet computer system that launched a nuclear attack against humanity in the catastrophe known as Judgment Day. The trope is as old as science fiction itself, and shadows the genre with all of the tenacity of an Uzi-toting T-800.