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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.
Soraya M. Coley, president of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, has been selected to receive the 2023 Donna Shavlik Award from the American Council on Education. She will be honored at the Women’s Leadership Dinner at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
The American Council on Education established the Donna Shavlik Award to commemorate the long and outstanding service of Donna Shavlik, former director of ACE’s Office of Women in Higher Education. Presented annually, the award honors an individual who demonstrates a sustained commitment to advancing women in higher education through leadership and career development.
“Throughout her decades-long career, President Coley has demonstrated a sustained and continuing commitment to the advancement of women through actions or initiatives enhancing women’s leadership development,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education. “President Coley’s unwavering dedication to advancing women in higher education exemplifies the spirit behind the ACE Donna Shavlik award.”
Dr. Coley has spent nearly her entire career in the California State University system, rising from lecturer to a tenured faculty member, department chair, dean, provost, and president. She is the first woman and first African American scholar to serve as president of Cal Poly Pomona.
Before being named president of Cal Poly Pomona, Dr. Coley was provost and vice president for academic affairs at California State University, Bakersfield. Earlier in her career, she served as provost and vice president for academic affairs at Alliant International University and as dean of the College of Human Development and Community Service at California State University, Fullerton.
Dr. Coley is a graduate of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where she majored in sociology. She holds a master’s degree in social planning and social work and a Ph.D. in social planning and policy from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
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.)
Ella Nora Phillips was born in Stringtown, West Virginia, in 1893. She had planned to become a teacher but decided to marry Charles Phillips who was a chauffeur in Pittsburgh. The couple had a daughter who died from whooping cough. Then Phillips Myers applied to the School of Pharmacy at the University of Pittsburgh. But she was rejected. She persisted and eventually was admitted in 1914. In the classroom, White males had the first rows of seats, and they were followed, in descending order, by White females, then Jews, then Blacks. She graduated in 1916 and became the first Black woman to practice pharmacy in Pennsylvania.
Myers established a drugstore in Pittsburgh before marrying fellow Pitt pharmacy graduate William Stewart in 1920. She changed her name to Ella P. Stewart. After moving to Ohio, she became the first Black pharmacist and employee to work at Youngstown City Hospital. Later, she and her husband then opened Toledo’s first Black-owned and operated drugstore.
Now the University of Pittsburgh is recognizing Stewart by naming a conference room in her honor. A portrait of Stewart commissioned by the university will hang on a wall of the conference room.
Stewart died in 1987. Her papers and memorabilia are held in archives at the University of Toledo and Bowling Green State University. An elementary school in Toledo was named in her honor.
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.
The Bancroft Prize is one of the nation’s top honors in the field of American history. The prizes are awarded annually by Columbia University for books published in the previous year, and judged by a panel of distinguished historians “in terms of scope, significance, depth of research, and richness of interpretation that they present in the areas of American history and diplomacy.” The prize includes a $10,000 award.
This year, one of the three winners is Black.
Kelly Lytle Hernández holds the Thomas E. Lifka Chair of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was honored for her book Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (W.W. Norton, 2022). The book is an “ambitious and exciting study of the Mexican Revolution as both Mexican and American history focused on the liberal-turned-anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón and the radical men and women that surrounded him,” according to the prize committee.
Dr. Lytle Hernández is also the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. Currently, Professor Lytle Hernández is the director and principal investigator for Million Dollar Hoods, a university-based, community-driven research project that maps the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles.
Professor Lytle Hernández is s graduate of the University of California, San Diego and earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles
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 Dan David Prize is awarded by the Dan David Foundation at Tel Aviv University in Israel to up to nine early and mid-career scholars and practitioners in the historical disciplines. The honor comes with a $300,000 prize. The prize was established in 2001 by Dan David, who lived through Nazi and Communist persecution in his native Romania before becoming a global business leader and philanthropist. The prize has the goal of rewarding and encouraging innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms. The prize is given in recognition of the winners’ contribution to the study of the past and to support their future endeavors.
Of this year’s nine winners, two are Black scholars with university affiliations in the United States.
Saheed Aderinto is a professor of history and African and African diaspora studies at Florida International University. Professor Aderinto describes himself as a serial methodologist and decompartmentalizing historian who adopts multiple disciplinary tools in understanding the past while blending different genres of history to reveal the complexities of people and events that came before us.
Dr. Aderinto has written a number of books, including When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958 (University of Illinois Press, 2014), Guns and Society in Colonial Nigeria: Firearms, Culture, and Public Order (Indiana University Press, January 2018), and Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria (Ohio University Press, 2022). He is currently writing a book and making a documentary about the history of Fuji music in Nigeria.
Professor Aderinto is a graduate of the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is the Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a historian who explores women’s social, economic, and legal relationships to enslaved people and to the slave trade in the trans-Atlantic world. Dr. Jones-Rogers’ research has been primarily concerned with women and slavery, but her work also explores the evolution and development of early systems of law, especially as they pertain to women, bondage, and the slave trade.
Dr. Jones-Rogers is the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale University Press, 2019), which draws on the testimonies of enslaved and formerly enslaved individuals, legal, financial, and military records as well as an array of other narrative sources to show how White married women – a group historically seen as legally disempowered and economically dispossessed – exercised extraordinary power in and over enslaved African-Americans’ lives.
Dr. Jones-Rogers earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology, a master’s degree in American history, and a Ph.D. in history all from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
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).
Elizabeth Armstrong-Mensah, clinical associate professor in the School of Public Health at Georgia State University in Atlanta, has been honored with the 2023 Early Career Teaching Excellence Award from the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health. The honor is given to one faculty member each year from among the 138 member institutions in the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health. The award recognizes faculty for outstanding teaching and mentoring of students in public health research, teaching, and practice.
“My passion for teaching and mentoring is rooted in the fact that I want every student I teach or mentor to excel,” Dr. Armstrong-Mensah said. “When I was a student in college, I benefited immensely from faculty who were passionate about the courses they taught. Their approach helped me excel in my studies. When I became a faculty member, I remembered how I had been taught and decided to pay it forward.”
Through the Undergraduate and Graduate Research and Publications Club, Dr. Armstrong-Mensah works with students to develop research that addresses a range of public health challenges. To date, more than 100 students have participated in the club, with more than 50 students publishing peer-reviewed research publications that advance knowledge as part of their club engagement experience.
“Dr. Armstrong-Mensah is dedicated to ensuring that students have learning experiences — both inside the classroom and out — that prepare them to make a difference in the health of communities,” said School of Public Health Dean Rodney Lyn. “I am thrilled that she has been recognized with this significant honor.”
Dr. Armstrong-Mensah joined the faculty at Georgia State University in 2017 after working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and teaching at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. She holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a master’s degree in international affairs from the University of Ghana. She earned a Ph.D. in international affairs and development from Clark Atlanta University.
C. Denise Okafor, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and of chemistry at Pennsylvania State University has been selected as a recipient of the 2023 Marion Milligan Mason Award for Women in the Chemical Sciences from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The Mason Award commemorates the late chemist Marion Tuttle Milligan Mason, who wanted to support the advancement of women in the chemical sciences. The Mason Award is a highly competitive award that attracts applications from the very best early-career female chemists across the country. First awarded in 2015, the Mason Award has funded the research of 18 scientists who represent a diverse range of specialties within the chemical sciences.
Dr. Okafor’s research combines computational and experimental investigations to develop a fundamental understanding of how protein function is regulated. She investigates the structural mechanisms of signaling and regulation in protein complexes and uses simulations to determine how conformational dynamics of proteins are altered in different functional states.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State in 2020, Dr. Okafor was a postdoctoral researcher at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta from 2015 to 2019.
Dr. Okafor earned a bachelor’s degree in biomedical chemistry at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She holds a master’s degree in chemistry and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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.
FreshRSS 