award
Bergès Wins Global Professorship
Sandrine Bèrges, professor of philosophy at Bilkent University, has been awarded one of eight “Global Professorships” by the British Academy.
The British Academy’s Global Professorships are “large investigator-led awards to attract internationally recognised established scholars to work in the United Kingdom, to undertake new, coherent and cutting-edge research projects.”
For her Global Professorship, from September 2024 through August 2028, Professor Bèrges will be in the Department of Philosophy at the University of York.
Her project is “Finding Diversity in Enlightenment’s Philosophy’s Attitude to Abolitionism”:
This new project aims to bring to light the way in which women, Black individuals and members of dissenting religious sects participated in the intellectual effort of late enlightenment abolitionism. These authors rarely feature in discussions of abolitionist movements of that period, even though some were prominently involved in the movement.
The benefits of an intersectional approach to feminism and anti-racism are well documented now. The abolitionist movements of the 18th century were male and female, Black and white, and had a variety of religious views. It is important to understand the extent to which agents who were not white males made a difference. Philosophical historians of the relevant period have greatly contributed to the erasure of those agents, and research is needed to bring them back in order to provide a more diverse and a more accurate history of this important philosophical moment.
Bèrges is the only philosophy professor among the awardees. Her Global Professorship award is £868,767 (about $1,081,600).
The post Bergès Wins Global Professorship first appeared on Daily Nous.
Young Epistemologist Prize Awarded to Co-Authors Kearl & Willard-Kyle
Timothy Kearl and Christopher Willard-Kyle, both postdoctoral researchers at the Cogito: Epistemology Research Centre at the University of Glasgow, are the winners of the 2023 Young Epistemologist Prize.
Timothy Kearl, Christopher Willard-Kyle
The prize is awarded by the Rutgers Epistemology Conference.
Dr. Kearl and Dr. Willard-Kyle won the prize for their paper, “Epistemic Cans”, which they will deliver at the upcoming Rutgers Epistemology Conference and which is forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Here’s the abstract:
We argue that S is in a position to know that p iff S can know that p. Thus, what makes position-to-know-ascriptions true is just a special case of what makes ability-ascriptions true: compossibility. The novelty of our compossibility theory of epistemic modality lies in its subsuming epistemic modality under agentive modality, the modality characterizing what agents can do.
The Young Epistemologist Prize includes $1000 and the coverage of expenses associated with attending the Rutgers conference. To be eligible to compete for it, a person must have a Ph.D. obtained by the time of the submission of the paper but not earlier than six years prior to the date of the conference.
You can learn more about Dr. Kearl’s work here and about Dr. Willard-Kyle’s work here.
This is the third time the Young Epistemology Prize has been awarded to scholars at the Cogito: Epistemology Research Centre at the University of Glasgow.
The post Young Epistemologist Prize Awarded to Co-Authors Kearl & Willard-Kyle first appeared on Daily Nous.
Two Winners of the 2024 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy
The Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy, sometimes referred to as the “Nobel Prize” of philosophy, was jointly awarded this year to Hans Kamp, professor of formal logics and philosophy of language at the University of Stuttgart, and Irene Heim, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
They received the prize particularly “for (mutually independent) conception and early development of dynamic semantics for natural language.”
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Schock Foundation award the prize. They write:
Natural languages are highly context-dependent—how a sentence is interpreted often depends on the situation, but also on what has been uttered before. In one type of case, a pronoun depends on an earlier phrase in a separate clause. In the mid-1970s, some constructions of this type posed a hard problem for formal semantic theory.
Around 1980, Hans Kamp and Irene Heim each separately developed very similar solutions to this problem. Their theories brought far-reaching changes in the field. Both introduced a new level of representation between the linguistic expression and its worldly interpretation and, in both, this level has a new type of linguistic meaning. Instead of the traditional idea that a clause describes a worldly condition, meaning at this level consists in the way it contributes to updating information. Based on these fundamentally new ideas, the theories provide adequate interpretations of the problematic constructions.
The prize is 600,000 Swedish kronor (approximately $58,000), which will be split between the two winners.
You can learn more about the Schock Prizes here and see a list of previous winners here.
NOTE: The prize amount was incorrectly stated as 400,000 SEK in the original version of this post. It has now been corrected.
The post Two Winners of the 2024 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy first appeared on Daily Nous.
DiFrisco Wins Popper Prize
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (BJPS) has awarded its 2023 Popper Prize to James DiFrisco (Francis Crick Institute).
The BJPS Popper Prize is awarded to the article judged to be the best published in that year’s volume of the journal, as determined by the Editors-in-Chief and the BSPS Committee.
Dr. DiFrisco won the award for his article, “Toward a Theory of Homology: Development and the De-coupling of Morphological and Molecular Evolution.”
Here’s the paper’s abstract:
Advances in developmental genetics and evo-devo in the last several decades have enabled the growth of novel developmental approaches to the classic theme of homology. These approaches depart from the more standard phylogenetic view by contending that homology between morphological characters depends on developmental-genetic individuation and explanation. This article provides a systematic re-examination of the relationship between developmental and phylogenetic homology in light of current evidence from developmental and evolutionary genetics and genomics. I present a qualitative model of the processes that cause de-coupling of morphological and molecular evolution by developmental system drift (DSD), and hypothesize that DSD is a widespread and regular stochastic process that is predictable from parameters such as population size, pleiotropy, and regulatory redundancy. These theoretical findings support an integrative approach in which models of DSD aid in determining when developmental-genetic explanations of homology apply and when other explanations such as stabilizing selection are needed. I argue that a phylogenetic monism about the definition and criteria of homology supports the integration of different explanations into a theory of homology better than pluralism does.
The prize includes a £500 award.
More information about the prize and a list of its previous winners can be found here.
The post DiFrisco Wins Popper Prize first appeared on Daily Nous.
Berggruen Launches New Philosophy Essay Competition
The Berggruen Institute, known for, among other things, its $1 million annual “philosophy and culture” prize, has launched a new philosophy essay competition.
The aim of the annual prize is
to stimulate new thinking and innovative concepts while embracing cross-cultural perspectives across fields, disciplines, and geographies. By posing fundamental philosophical questions of significance for both contemporary life and for the future, the competition will serve as a complement to the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture, which recognizes major lifetime achievements in advancing ideas that have shaped the world.
The contest will accept submissions in English or Chinese, with a winner selected from each language. The winning articles will be published in the institute’s magazines, Noema (English) and Cuiling (Chinese).
The winners will each receive $25,000.
They are not seeking peer-reviewed academic work, nor presumably writing in that style (a few of the examples they provide, such as Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” were published in academic philosophy journals, but I suppose they’re taken to be not representative of the genre). Rather, they say:
We are inviting essays that follow in the tradition of renowned thinkers such as Rousseau, Michel de Montaigne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Submissions should present novel ideas and be clearly argued in compelling ways for intellectually serious readers.
The deadline for the inaugural contest is June 30th, 2024.
You can learn more about the prize here.
The post Berggruen Launches New Philosophy Essay Competition first appeared on Daily Nous.
Boehm Wins Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding
The 2024 Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding has been awarded to philosopher Omri Boehm (The New School) for his book Radical Universalism.
The award, which includes 20,000 euros, will be presented to Professor Boehm at the Leipzig Book Fair taking place later this month.
The award jury writes:
The German-Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm will be honoured with the 2024 Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding for his uncompromising defence of the core values of humanistic universalism and the obligation to recognise the equality of all human beings without relativising in any way. In his latest book, entitled Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity (2022), Boehm resolutely opposes the ideological hardening of the present and takes Kant’s definition of enlightenment as man’s emergence from self-imposed immaturity as the basis for a critical examination of Western liberalism and its tendency to think in terms of identities that then become absolute.
According to Boehm, even in modern societies, ultimate truths are necessary in order to protect human equality and dignity. He does not shy away from promoting metaphysical rationales for universalism, finding them in the intersection of Kant’s philosophy and the legacy of the biblical prophets. In an original reading of the Hebrew Bible, he discovers a figure of disobedience in Abraham, who sacrificed the ram instead of his son. By insisting on the idea of justice against God, Abraham becomes the archetype of ethical monotheism. Kant then interprets this idea in the language of modern philosophy. Omri Boehm’s groundwork on humanistic universalism is of significant political relevance. His books, including A Future for Israel: Beyond the Two-State Solution (2020), simultaneously defend and challenge liberal democracies by demanding obligatory universalism.
You can learn more about the prize, and see a list of previous winners, here.
(via John Bengson)
The post Boehm Wins Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding first appeared on Daily Nous.
Maley Wins Herbert A. Simon Award
The executive board of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP) has selected Corey J. Maley, associate professor of philosophy at Purdue University, as the winner of its 2024 Herbert A. Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy.
The Simon Award “recognizes scholars at an early stage of their academic career whose research is likely to reshape debates at the nexus of Computing and Philosophy.”
The board recognized Professor Maley for his work on the nature and varieties of computation. They write:
He is currently working on a theory of computation that is broad enough to incorporate distinct types of computation as species (i.e., both digital and analog) in both artifacts and natural systems (i.e., engineered systems and neural systems). At the same time, this theory needs to be narrow enough to avoid making everything computational, or making computation a mere matter of perspective. Finally, this theory should make clear what the various types of computation have in common such that they are all of the same genera, yet distinct enough to count as separate species of that genera. Much of this project has been informed by Corey’s research into analog computation, which is not (as is commonly thought) essentially about continuity. Revealing the differences between analog and digital computation, as well as their similarities, has illuminated what aspects of computation are specific only to digital computation, and not necessary features of computation in general.
As part of the award, Professor Maley will present the Simon Award Keynote Address at the IACAP 2024 conference this summer in Eugene, Oregon.
You can a list of previous winners of the Simon Award here.
The post Maley Wins Herbert A. Simon Award first appeared on Daily Nous.
Lenhard Wins 2024 Covey Award
Johannes Lenhard (Rhineland-Palatinate Technical University) has been selected as the winner of the 2024 Covey Award by the board of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP).
The Covey Award is given on an annual basis to “senior scholars with a substantial record of innovative research in the field of computing and philosophy broadly conceived.”
The IACAP board writes:
How does using a computer change the methodology and epistemology of the sciences? How does computational modeling transform the use of mathematical tools? Lenhard’s research aims at tackling these questions in a way that speaks to philosophers, historians, and scientists alike.
Lenhard is the author of Calculated Surprises. A Philosophy of Computer Simulation (Oxford University Press, 2019), and the forthcoming Cultures of Prediction. How Engineering and Science Evolve with Mathematical Tools (MIT Press, 2024), which he co-authored with the late Ann Johnson (Cornell University, University of South Carolina). You can learn more about his research here.
Lenhard will present the Covey Award Keynote Address at IACAP 2024 conference in Eugene, Oregon this July.
A list of previous winners of the Covey Award is here.
The post Lenhard Wins 2024 Covey Award first appeared on Daily Nous.
UNRWA nominated for Nobel Peace Prize – but Israel freezes its bank accounts
Israeli move likely to mean even faster starvation for hundreds of thousands
UNRWA, the United Nations relief agency for Palestine, has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The news comes as the assault on UNRWA’s funding intensifies.
A number of nations have, inexcusably, used Israel’s claims – that twelve of the agency’s more than 13,000 employees in Gaza took part in the 7 October raid – as a pretext for cutting off funding to UNRWA despite its central role in providing relief for the two million Palestinians in Gaza who are in starvation because of Israel’s blockade.
And Israeli bank Leumi has today locked all of UNRWA’s accounts, claiming UNRWA is unable to provide sufficient receipts to be able to prove no funds are going to ‘terrorists’. The UN has said it has no alternative mechanism to fund UNRWA if international donations are cut off and a number of nations – including Norway, home of the Nobel Peace Prize – have said they will continue to provide funds. But if UNRWA is unable to access them where it needs them, it will be even more severely hampered.
Norwegian Labour MP Asmund Aukrust told Dagbladet that he had nominated UNRWA,
for its long-term work to provide vital support to Palestine and the region in general.
Israel bombed the relief offices last week of Belgium, another country whose government has committed to funding UNRWA.
The nomination is an apt response to Israel’s smears against UNRWA and the collusion of some western nations, including the US and UK, in the genocide in Gaza. But it will not feed the starving – and despite being officially on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and ordered by the ICJ to protect Palestinian lives, the Israeli apartheid regime’s murderousness toward the millions of civilian Palestinians in Gaza appears to know no bounds.
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New Teaching Philosophy with Technology Prize
Oxford University Press and the American Philosophical Association (APA) have teamed up to launch the new “Oxford University Press Teaching with Technology Prize.”
The prize “recognizes outstanding use of technology in the teaching of philosophy and philosophical pedagogy by philosophers at a junior career stage” who are also members of the APA.
The prize is $2000 and a certificate, plus funds for travel to the APA meeting at which the prize is awarded. There is also the possibility of a $500 honorable mention prize being awarded.
The contest has two stages: a nomination stage (self nominations are allowed), and then a stage for a selection of the contestants to submit more detailed information and materials.
The first deadline is February 25th.
More details are here.
The post New Teaching Philosophy with Technology Prize first appeared on Daily Nous.