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The Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board has honored philosophers Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch with plaques at their former homes.
The Blue Plaques program “promotes recognition and awareness of people, places and events that have been of lasting significance in the life of Oxfordshire or more widely.”
You can see a list of other Blue Plaque honorees here.
The post Foot & Murdoch Honored With Plaques in Oxfordshire first appeared on Daily Nous.
Three philosophers have been named 2023 Guggenheim Fellows.
They are:
Stephen Darwall, Jennifer Morton, and Susanna Siegel
The fellowships are for 6-12 months, with monetary awards of varying amounts, and are given with no strings attached. There were 180 new fellows announced. You can view the entire list of them here.
A few philosophers have picked up grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently.
They are:
You can learn more about NSF grants here.
(Previous post about NSF grant winners is here.)
Oron Shagrir, professor of philosophy and cognitive and brain sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the winner of the 2023 Covey Award.
The Covey Award, presented by the International Association of Computing and Philosophy (IACAP), “recognizes senior scholars with a substantial record of innovative research in the field of computing and philosophy broadly conceived”.
The IACAP says: “The board recognised Professor Shagrir’s significant contribution to our field over several decades; in particular, his contribution to theories of computation.”
He will present the Covey Award Keynote Address at IACAP 2023 conference this July in Prague.
You can learn more about Professor Shagrir’s research here.
A list of previous winners of the Covey Award is here.
The Joseph Levenson Prize is awarded by the Association for Asian Studies to “the English-language books that make the greatest contribution to increasing understanding of the history, culture, society, politics, or economy of China.”
This year’s prize contest recognized books published in 2021, and honorable mention in the pre-1900 category was awarded to Tao Jiang, (a philosopher in the Department of Religion at Rutgers University, and director of the university’s Center for Chinese Studies) for his book, Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China (Oxford University Press).
It appears that Professor Jiang’s book is one of the few philosophy titles recognized in the history of the Levenson Prize since its inception in 1987.
Here’s a description of the book:
This book rewrites the story of classical Chinese philosophy, which has always been considered the single most creative and vibrant chapter in the history of Chinese philosophy. Works attributed to Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi and many others represent the very origins of moral and political thinking in China. As testimony to their enduring stature, in recent decades many Chinese intellectuals, and even leading politicians, have turned to those classics, especially Confucian texts, for alternative or complementary sources of moral authority and political legitimacy. Therefore, philosophical inquiries into core normative values embedded in those classical texts are crucial to the ongoing scholarly discussion about China as China turns more culturally inward. It can also contribute to the spirited contemporary debate about the nature of philosophical reasoning, especially in the non-Western traditions.
This book offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three normative values, humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated, reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains, the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible sources within the context of an evolving understanding of Heaven and its relationship with the humans. Tao Jiang argues that the competing visions in that debate can be characterized as a contestation between partialist humaneness and impartialist justice as the guiding norm for the newly imagined moral-political order, with the Confucians, the Mohists, the Laoists, and the so-called fajia thinkers being the major participants, constituting the mainstream philosophical project during this period. Thinkers lined up differently along the justice-humaneness spectrum with earlier ones maintaining some continuity between the two normative values (or at least trying to accommodate both to some extent) while later ones leaning more toward their exclusivity in the political/public domain. Zhuangzi and the Zhuangists were the outliers of the mainstream moral-political debate who rejected the very parameter of humaneness versus justice in that discourse. They were a lone voice advocating personal freedom, but the Zhuangist expressions of freedom were self-restricted to the margins of the political world and the interiority of one’s heartmind. Such a take can shed new light on how the Zhuangist approach to personal freedom would profoundly impact the development of this idea in pre-modern Chinese political and intellectual history.
The winning book this year is by historian Ruth Mostern (Pittsburgh): The Yellow River (Yale University Press), a 3000-year history of China’s Yellow River.
You can learn more about the prize, including its previous recipients, here.
The Journal of Applied Philosophy has awarded its 2022 Best Essay Prize to Scott Altman (USC).
Professor Altman won the prize for his article, “Selling Silence: The Morality of Sexual Harassment NDAs“. Here’s its abstract:
This article argues against enforcing sexual harassment nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). Although NDAs guard privacy, facilitate settlement, and compensate victims, they also help repeat perpetrators avoid detection and punishment, endangering future victims and undermining efforts to combat sexual harassment. Advocates argue that victims have no duty to prevent these harms, given the risks and trauma of reporting. I offer three responses. First, although most victims have no duty to speak, some victims might come to have such a duty. The state should not help them commit to violating a future duty. Second, some initially reticent victims may later want to disclose. The state should not enforce promises not to do supererogatory acts. Third, NDAs make victims complicit with the perpetrator’s future harassment and wrongful efforts to avoid social punishment. If perpetrators refuse to compensate victims adequately without NDAs, we should increase victim compensation rather than enforce NDAs. Accused harassers might claim they need NDAs to guard against wrongful or excessive social punishment. For guilty perpetrators, NDAs resemble felony expungement statutes. However, arguments for expungement do not apply to NDAs. Although falsely accused people have legitimate privacy interests, NDAs are an excessively broad way to protect this interest.
The prize of £1,000 is awarded to the author of the best paper published in the journal that year, as judged by journal’s editors.
A list of previous winners of the prize is here.
Claire Katz, professor of philosophy at Texas A & M University, is one of three finalists for the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching from Baylor University, which includes generous prizes for the finalists, winner, and their home departments.
As a finalist, Professor Katz will receive $15,000 and will be invited to present a series of lectures at Baylor University, and her home department at Texas A & M will receive $10,000 for pedagogical development. The winner of the award will receive an additional $250,000 prize and will teach in residence at Baylor University for a semester; the winner’s home department will receive an additional $25,000.
The award site’s description of Professor Katz describes what contributes to her being a good candidate for the award:
Claire Katz is professor of philosophy of education and serves as interim department head of the Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture at Texas A&M. Before joining A&M in 2006, she was associate professor of philosophy and Jewish studies at Penn State University. She teaches and conducts research in two primary areas: (1) the intersection of philosophy, gender, education and religion and (2) K-12 philosophy.
In 2015, Katz launched the preK-12 philosophy program, which are educator workshops for K-12 and university teachers/administrators that have reached more than 100 teachers and administrators in Texas; training for university students in facilitating philosophical discussions with pre-college students; and developing and running a week-long philosophy summer camp (Aggie School of Athens) for middle and high school students from communities across Texas and the U.S.
She is the recipient of several awards, including the 2019 Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award (University Level) for Teaching, the 2019 American Philosophical Association Prize for Excellence in Teaching Philosophy and the 2020 Presidential Professor for Teaching Excellence, and was named a Piper Professor in Texas in 2021.
Professor Katz wrote a guest post for Daily Nous about the philosophy summer camp she runs, which you can check out here, and put together two edited collections about it, Growing Up with Philosophy Camp: How Thinking Develops Friendship, Community, and a Sense of Self, and Philosophy Camps for Youths: Everything You Wanted To Know about Starting, Organizing, and Running a Philosophy Camp.
The Cherry Award is named for, and was established with a bequest from, Baylor alumus Robert Foster Cherry, who graduated from the university in 1929. It is awarded biennially. You can learn more about it here.
(via Daniel Conway)
The British Journal for the History of Philosophy has announced the winners of three of its prizes.
The journal awarded the 2022 Rogers Prize—its annual prize for the best article it publishes—to Michael Kremer (University of Chicago) for his paper “Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle: a philosophical friendship”. Here’s the abstract of his article:
This article considers the personal and philosophical relationship between two philosophers, Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle. I show that a letter from MacDonald to Ryle found at Linacre College, Oxford, was part of an extensive correspondence, and that the two were intimate friends and philosophical interlocutors, and I explore the relationship between their respective philosophies. MacDonald, who studied with Wittgenstein before coming to Oxford in 1937, deployed and developed Wittgensteinian themes in her own subsequent work. I show that this work was an important source of ideas in Ryle’s philosophy. I examine two episodes: (1) a 1937 symposium in which MacDonald gave the lead paper, and Ryle was a respondent—I argue that Ryle derived his famous distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that from her paper; and (2) Ryle’s rejection in Dilemmas (1953/4) of the central importance of the idea of a ‘category mistake’—I argue that this may have been in response to MacDonald’s critical review of The Concept of Mind. Along the way I consider the development of MacDonald’s metaphilosophical views, and I shed new light on MacDonald’s remarkable biography.
This article and the topic of underappreciated philosophical friendships were discussed previously at Daily Nous here.
clockwise from top left: Michael Kremer, Lea Cantor, Michael Morgan, and Claudia Dumitru
The winner of the Rogers Prize receives £1,000. The prize was established in 2012 in honor of John Rogers, the founding editor of the journal.
The journal awarded its Beaney Prize—its annual prize for the best contribution to widening the canon it publishes—to Lea Cantor (University of Oxford) for her paper “Thales – the ‘first philosopher’? A troubled chapter in the historiography of philosophy”. Here’s the abstract of her article:
It is widely believed that the ancient Greeks thought that Thales was the first philosopher, and that they therefore maintained that philosophy had a Greek origin. This paper challenges these assumptions, arguing that most ancient Greek thinkers who expressed views about the history and development of philosophy rejected both positions. I argue that not even Aristotle presented Thales as the first philosopher, and that doing so would have undermined his philosophical commitments and interests. Beyond Aristotle, the view that Thales was the first philosopher is attested almost nowhere in antiquity. In the classical, Hellenistic, and post-Hellenistic periods, we witness a marked tendency to locate the beginning of philosophy in a time going back further than Thales. Remarkably, ancient Greek thinkers most often traced the origins of philosophy to earlier non-Greek peoples. Contrary to the received view, then, I argue that (1) vanishingly few Greek writers pronounced Thales the first philosopher; and (2) most Greek thinkers did not even advocate a Greek origin of philosophy. Finally, I show that the view that philosophy originated with Thales (along with its misleading attribution to the Greeks in general) has roots in problematic, and in some cases manifestly racist, eighteenth-century historiography of philosophy.
The winner of the Beaney Prize receives £1,000. The prize was established in 2021 in honour of Mike Beaney, Editor of the journal from 2011 to 2021.
Lastly, the journal awarded its Best Graduate Essay Prize for 2022 to Claudia Dumitru (
The Graduate Essay Prize is £1000, and is awarded annually to the writer of an essay that makes a significant contribution to the history of philosophy. The competition is open to all graduate students, anywhere in the world, studying any subject.
Simon Keller, professor of philosophy and head of the School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, has been elected as a fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi (formerly known as the Royal Society of New Zealand).
The mission of the Royal Society is to “honour, recognise and encourage outstanding achievement in the sciences, technologies and humanities”.
The society announced its most recent class of fellows yesterday, describing their work. Of Professor Keller, they write:
Simon Keller is a philosopher who specialises in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of mental health and disorder. He has written extensively about the moral and political dimensions of relationships, examining family relationships, friendships, erotic love, and patriotism. His work on mental health looks at the assumptions that lie behind our ways of dividing mental conditions into the healthy and the unhealthy, and the links between mental health and the living of a good human life. In other work, Keller explores such topics as well-being (“welfare”), political freedom, equality, the significance of death, and the way we form beliefs about science. Unifying his work is a concern with how small, often unnoticed details of human life are amplified so as to become powerful political and social forces. He is the author of The Limits of Loyalty (winner of the American Philosophical Association Book Prize) and Partiality, and a co-author of The Ethics of Patriotism: A Debate. He is Professor of Philosophy at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, having worked previously at Boston University and University of Melbourne. He has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, Rice University, and LMU Munich.
Keller is the only philosopher among the 34 new fellows. You can learn more about his work here.
(via Michael Smith)
An interdisciplinary team led by philosopher Havi Carel (Bristol) has won a £2.6 million grant for its project, “Epistemic Injustice in Health Care” (EPIC).
The “Discovery Grant“, from the charitable science foundation Wellcome, will fund the project for six years, beginning this September.
In addition to Professor Carel, the core team is:
They will be bringing on six* postdoctoral researchers and a range of other researchers and collaborators from Swansea, City and Aston Universities, and the Universities of Bologna and Ferrara.
(l to r) Lisa Bortolotti, Matthew Broome, Havi Carel, Ian James Kidd, Sheelagh McGuinness
According to the team, the project
will offer a systematic investigation of epistemic injustice across a diverse range of case studies—including somatic and psychiatric illnesses, and neurodiverse persons, as well as children and those in later-life care. EPIC aims to identify the interpersonal, institutional, and cultural dimensions of epistemic injustices. The project will include a range of events, postdoctoral positions, and publications and aims to identify practical measures for the benefit of patients and healthcare practitioners alike.
Inquiries about the project should be sent to Professor Carel.
(* Note: the original post stated there would be eight postdocs. That was an error.)
The Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) has awarded a €8.9 million “Cluster of Excellence” grant to the “Knowledge in Crisis” project headed by philosopher Tim Crane (Central European University).
The project involves researchers at CEU as well as the Universities of Vienna, Graz and Salzburg. The universities themselves have also committed money to the project, bringing its total funding to roughly €15 million. The project looks at how recent social and technological deveopments affect knowledge:
Today we face a crisis of knowledge. Our claims to knowledge are being threatened by rapid and spectacular developments in technology, and by attacks on the very ideas of knowledge and truth themselves. The flood of information on the internet challenges our ability to tell truth from falsehood, and there is a widespread rejection of the standards of scientific evidence and expertise. The crisis raises deep philosophical questions about knowledge, truth, science, ethics, and politics, and ultimately about our relationship to reality itself. These questions will be addressed in entirely new ways by this Cluster of Excellence, which will work to understand the crisis of knowledge in all its manifestations, and to find ways to combat it and reshape our relationship to knowledge.
Professor Crane writes that the aim of the project is to “to investigate various challenges to scientific and other knowledge by connecting many otherwise unconnected areas of philosophy: metaphysics, ethics, political and social philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. The idea is to bring together areas of philosophy which are often isolated from one another, with the aim of getting a deeper understanding of the current crises of knowledge.”
He notes that the funds will be used for, among other things, 18 new academic appointments (postdocs and professors) and for funding PhD students.
The board of directors for the Knowledge in Crisis Project (l to r): Katalin Farkas, Marian David, Paulina Sliwa, Max Kölbel, Tim Crane, Hans Bernhard Schmid, and Charlotte Werndl.
In addition to Professor Crane, the project’s board of directors includes:
You can learn more about the Cluster of Excellence awards here.
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science has named Zina B. Ward (Florida State) the winner of its 2022 Popper Prize.
The Popper Prize, named for Karl Popper, is awarded to the best articles appearing in the journal which concern themselves with topics in the philosophy of science to which Popper made a significant contribution, as determined by the Editors-in-Chief and the British Society for the Philosophy of Science Committee.
Professor Ward won the prize for her “Registration Pluralism and the Cartographic Approach to Data Aggregation across Brains“. Here’s what the judges had to say about it:
In ‘Registration Pluralism and the Cartographic Approach to Data Aggregation across Brains’, Zina B. Ward tackles a methodological issue of central importance in cognitive neuroscience: how to register data from multiple subjects in a common spatial framework despite significant variation in human brain structure, that is, how to map activity in different subjects’ neural structures onto a single template or into a common representational space. In a typical fMRI-based investigation, experimenters run a series of subjects through a scanner and, if the experiment is fruitful, draw conclusions, from the data collected, about the functional contributions of certain areas of the brain—that, for instance, the ACC regulates emotional responses to pain. Such work presupposes normalization of the images from various subjects, so as to allow experimenters to claim that, across subjects, the same area of the brain exhibited elevated activity during scanning. The requirements of normalization might seem to pose a mere technical problem; perhaps with hard work and ingenuity, neuroscientists can identify the single, correct method for pairing brain areas or regions across subjects. Ward argues against this kind of monism. For principled reasons to do with the extent and nature of variation in neural structure—for example, variation in the location of sulci relative to cytoarchitectonic boundaries—Ward argues that the choice of spatial framework and method of registration must vary, depending on the purpose of a given study. No single method will simultaneously effect all of the correct pairings of relevance to cognitive neuroscience. From a practical standpoint, such methodological pluralism may seem daunting, and it might also seem excessively theory-laden. In response to such concerns, Ward offers and defends a series of constructive proposals concerning how to implement registration pluralism.
For its impressive theoretical and practical contributions to an issue of central importance in cognitive neuroscience, the BJPS Co-Editors-in-Chief and the BSPS Committee judge ‘Registration Pluralism and the Cartographic Approach to Data Aggregation across Brains’ to be worthy of the 2022 BJPS Popper Prize.
The prize includes £500.
Three others received honorable mention. They are:
You can learn more about the Popper Prize and see a list of past winners here.
The Philosophy of Animal Minds and Behavior Association (PAMBA) has announced the winners of its first Essay Prize.
They are: Rhys Borchert and Caleb Dewey of the University of Arizona.
Borchert and Dewey won the prize for their essay, “In Praise of Animals”. Here’s the abstract of the paper:
Reasons-responsive accounts of praiseworthiness say, roughly, that an agent is praiseworthy for an action if the reasons that explain why they acted are also the reasons that explain why the action is right. In this paper, we argue that reasons-responsive accounts imply that some actions of non-human animals are praiseworthy. Trying to exclude non-human animals, we argue, risks neglecting cases of inadvertent virtue in human action and undermining the anti-intellectualist commitments that are typically associated with reasons-responsive accounts. Of course, this could be taken as a reason to reject reasons-responsive accounts, rather than as a reason to attribute praiseworthiness to non-human animal action. We respond to two reasons that one might resist the implication that non-human animal action is praiseworthy. The first appeals to intuition: it’s too counterintuitive to attribute praiseworthiness to non-human animal action. In response, we argue that once the factors that determine an action’s praiseworthiness are disambiguated from the factors that determine whether an agent should be praised, the intuitive objection loses much of its force. The second appeals to empirical evidence: attributing praiseworthiness to non-human animal action involves a problematic kind of anthropomorphizing. First, we point out that this objection is mostly an a priori objection in a posteriori clothes: whether we give anthropomorphic vs. anthropectic explanations is a methodological choice, not an empirical one. Second, we argue that considerations from the cognitive modeling literature actually support anthropomorphic explanations over anthropectic explanations.
The prize includes publication of the winning essay in Biology and Philosophy, as well as travel funds of up to CA$3000 to present their work at the Inaugural Meeting of PAMBA, to be held in Madrid in April 26–28, 2023.
The jury awarded an Honorable Mention to Giulia Palazzolo (University of Warwick) for her paper titled ‘A Case for Animal Reference: Beyond functional referentialism and meaning attribution’.
The jurors for this year’s competition were Colin Allen (University of Pittsburgh), Kristin Andrews (York University), Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University), and Richard Moore (University of Warwick), and the committee was chaired by Susan Monsó (UNED).
Lisa Herzog, Professor of Political Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy and Centre for Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Groningen, has been awarded a €1.5 million grant for a project that seeks to develop a democratic philosophy of work.
The grant is from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
The project is entitled, “Working Democracy. A Philosophy of Work for Democratic Societies”. On the NWO website, the project is described as follows:
How should democracies understand and organize work? This project draws on empirical and philosophical analyses of non-standard forms of work—digital, precarious, and migrant work—to analyze current developments and their implications for democracy. It also addresses the unresolved question about the relation between paid and unpaid work and draws on the history of ideas, to develop a democratic philosophy of work, in dialogue with societal actors, that can inform labor market regulation from a democratic perspective.
The grant will run for five years and will be used to fund several PhD and postdoctoral positions, among other things.
You can read an interview with Professor Herzog here.
Two philosophers have been included in the 2022 class of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellows.
They are: Alan C. Love of the University of Minnesota, and Roberta L. Millstein of the University of California, Davis.
The new class of fellows was announced last month. Most of the 505 new fellows work in the sciences. The AAAS says that its fellows “are a distinguished cadre of scientists, engineers and innovators who have been recognized for their achievements across disciplines, from research, teaching, and technology, to administration in academia, industry and government, to excellence in communicating and interpreting science to the public.”
The mission of the AAAS is to “advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all.” You can learn more about the organization here and see the full list of new fellows here.
“Proper names play powerful social roles in human societies, such as promoting social cohesiveness, enhancing individual flourishing, and serving as a tool for social exclusion. Could other animals who live in complex social groups and have sophisticated communication systems also use these kinds of labels?”
That’s the question at the heart of a project led by Carrie Figdor, professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa that will focus on name use by bonobos and dolphins. “Establishing such proper naming would be a major step in understanding the transition to metacognitive functions, such as theory of mind and perspective taking, necessary for certain forms of intelligence,” she writes.
The project was recently awarded a $234,000 grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation as part of its “Big Questions” funding.
The research team includes psychologists, and experts in primates and cetaceans.
You can learn more about the project here.
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science just awarded its 2022 Referee of the Year award to Kenneth Aizawa (Rutgers Newark).
The editorial team writes, “Across 2022, one person rose above some stiff competition to win our referee of the year award. Kenneth Aizawa consistently demonstrated great generosity with his expertise, providing our editors with speedy and judicious advice and our authors with the sort of insight that brings out the best in their projects. We are tremendously grateful to Ken for his invaluable contribution to our discipline.” The award includes a lifetime honorary membership in the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.
When I last posted about this award, back in 2020, I asked whether other journals had such awards. At the time, none did. Have any been instituted since then? Or any other mechanisms for rewarding referee work?
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).
Paolo Mancosu, Sergio Galvan, and Richard Zach
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. Structural proof theory investigates the structure and properties of proofs in different formal deductive systems, including axiomatic derivations, natural deduction, and the sequent calculus. Central results in structural proof theory are the normalization theorem for natural deduction, proved here for both intuitionistic and classical logic, and the cut-elimination theorem for the sequent calculus. In formal systems of number theory formulated in the sequent calculus, the induction rule plays a central role. It can be eliminated from proofs of sequents of a certain elementary form: every proof of an atomic sequent can be transformed into a “simple” proof. This is Hilbert’s central idea for giving finitary consistency proofs. The proof requires a measure of proof complexity called an ordinal notation. The branch of proof theory dealing with mathematical systems such as arithmetic thus has come to be called ordinal proof theory. The theory of ordinal notations is developed here in purely combinatorial terms, and the consistency proof for arithmetic presented in detail.
The Shoenfield Article Prize was awarded to Vasco Brattka (Bundeswehr University Munich) for his article, “A Galois Connection between Turing Jumps and Limits”, published in Logical Methods in Computer Science in 2018.
Vasco Brattka
Here’s the abstract of his article:
Limit computable functions can be characterized by Turing jumps on the input side or limits on the output side. As a monad of this pair of adjoint operations we obtain a problem that characterizes the low functions and dually to this another problem that characterizes the functions that are computable relative to the halting problem. Correspondingly, these two classes are the largest classes of functions that can be pre or post composed to limit computable functions without leaving the class of limit computable functions. We transfer these observations to the lattice of represented spaces where it leads to a formal Galois connection. We also formulate a version of this result for computable metric spaces. Limit computability and computability relative to the halting problem are notions that coincide for points and sequences, but even restricted to continuous functions the former class is strictly larger than the latter. On computable metric spaces we can characterize the functions that are computable relative to the halting problem as those functions that are limit computable with a modulus of continuity that is computable relative to the halting problem. As a consequence of this result we obtain, for instance, that Lipschitz continuous functions that are limit computable are automatically computable relative to the halting problem. We also discuss 1-generic points as the canonical points of continuity of limit computable functions, and we prove that restricted to these points limit computable functions are computable relative to the halting problem. Finally, we demonstrate how these results can be applied in computable analysis.
The Shoenfield prizes are awarded every three years. Any new book published during the nine years prior to the award year is eligible for the book prize; any article published during the six years prior to the award year is eligible for the article prize. You can see a list of previous prize winners here.
The Journal of the History of Philosophy has awarded its 2022 best article prize to Karolina Hübner (Cornell).
Professor Hübner won the prize, which recognizes the best article published in the journal in 2022, for her, “Representation and Mind-Body Identity in Spinoza’s Philosophy“. Here’s the abstract of the article:
The paper offers a new reading of Spinoza’s claim that minds and bodies are “one and the same thing,” commonly understood as a claim about the identity of a referent under two different descriptions. This paper proposes instead that Spinoza’s texts and his larger epistemological commitments show that he takes mind-body identity to be (1) an identity grounded in an intentional relation, and (2) an identity of one thing existing in two different ways.
The prize comes with an award of $1500.
A list of previous winners of the award can be found here.
(via Deborah Boyle)
The European Research Council (ERC) recently announced the winners of their sizable “Consolidator Grants,” and several philosophers were among them.
They are:
A.J. Cotnoir (University of St Andrews)
“Instruments of Unity: the Many Ways of Being One”
We perceive unities everywhere: from ant colonies to cellular automata, from organisms to organisations. Yet we have little understanding of the general constraints by which they are unified. The Instruments of Unity Project tackles this abstract question in a way that provides concrete applicable answers. The core hypothesis: unity is a complex pluralistic phenomenon, requiring a multifaceted theoretical approach. We identify unity relations across a variety of formal settings in a way that is receptive to insights and tools from the cognitive and computing sciences, even addressing the ‘meta-question’ as to whether there’s any unity to the different types of unity. We plan to apply the resulting framework to problems in metaphysics, social ontology, and formal ontology. Along the way, we seek to rehabilitate a more holistic ‘carving’-based metaphysics over against the dominant reductionistic ‘building’-based paradigm. (€1.7 million)
Dennis Lehmkuhl (University of Bonn)
“The Centre of Gravity Project”
The foundations of the general theory of relativity (GR) were laid by Albert Einstein in 1915. But much of what has been built on those foundations was developed in the Renaissance Period of GR between 1955 and 1975. In these years, several researchers built on Einstein’s foundations, but also revolutionized the mathematical tools and physical concepts within GR. Indeed, without the concepts and tools formed during this Renaissance, the recent observation of gravitational waves, rewarded with the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017, and the convincing prediction of and mounting evidence for the existence of black holes, rewarded with the Nobel Prize in physics in 2020, would not have been possible. And yet, these developments have not been properly investigated by historians or philosophers of science thus far. The goal of The Centre of Gravity Project (COGY) is to close this gap. The project will combine pioneering research on the published papers and literary estates of the core figures of the Renaissance period—such as Sir Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking, Sir Hermann Bondi, Jürgen Ehlers and John Wheeler—with the analysis of detailed oral-history interviews. The aim is to get to the bottom of the most advanced mathematical techniques and conceptual innovations of GR, concepts like black holes, event horizons, and trapped surfaces.The project team will consist of historians and philosophers of physics as well as physicists and mathematicians. (€1.99 million)
Gry Oftedal (University of Oslo)
“Self-Assembly: Shifting our View of Life”
The project aims to build a new theoretical framework within the philosophy of science for understanding and explaining life, by bringing in the increasing knowledge about selfassembly processes from the life sciences. Researchers in the project will develop a comprehensive analysis of self-assembly across scales and look at differences and similarities to ideas of self-organization. We will challenge current ideas of mechanist and interventionist accounts of explanation and aim to build bridges between mechanist and organicist ideas of life. (€1.97 million)
Christian Vassallo (University of Calabria)
“Assessing Philosophical Authors and Texts from Herculaneum and Elsewhere on Early Stoicism: Insights into Ancient Logic, Physics, and Ethics towards a new von Arnim”
The project aims to remake, through a team of researchers and a task force of American and European universities, the Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, that is the edition of fragments and testimonies concerning the first phase of early Stoicism. (€2 million)
Susana Viegas (NOVA University of Lisbon)
“Film-Philosophy as a Meditation on Death”
“Film-Philosophy as a Meditation on Death” explores the affinities between philosophy and cinema. The research project seeks to bring together two distinct practices, but with a common interest in the theme of death, without which one would not have begun to philosophize and for which films show a special interest as a narrative and formal motif. To substantiate an emerging area of philosophical studies, such as Philosophy of Cinema, will be one of the main contributions of this project that seeks to understand the paradoxical situation in which we live: if on the one hand, we avoid thinking about death on our daily lives, we readily discuss the theme when it appears in films or television series. (€1.7 million)
According to European Research Council President Maria Leptin, “ERC Consolidator grants support researchers at a crucial time of their careers, strengthening their independence, reinforcing their teams and helping them establish themselves as leaders in their fields. And this backing above all gives them a chance to pursue their scientific dreams.”
In total, the ERC awarded €657 million to 321 researchers in this round of grants. For more information, including links to the full list of grant recipients, go here.
FreshRSS 