The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the winners of its substantial, multi-year Starting Grants, and several philosophy faculty are among them.

They are:

Graziana Ciola (Radboud University)
The Impossible and the Imaginable: Late-Medieval Semantics of Impossibility and the Roots of Complex Mathematics (€1,498,894)

Niels Martens
Philosophy of Cosmology: Matter and SpaceTime Eradicated (€1,499,790)

Thomas Schindler (University of Amsterdam)
Generalisation into Sentence and Predicate Positions (€1,493,715)

Many theoretical contexts require generalisation into sentence and predicate positions, a high-level form of generalisation where (roughly speaking) we make a general statement about a class of statements (e.g. mathematical induction, laws of logic). There are two competing methods for achieving this form of generality: higher-order logics and first-order theories of truth, properties, and sets, respectively. As both methods come with their own ideological and ontological commitments, it makes a substantial difference which one is chosen as the framework for formulating our mathematical, scientific, and philosophical theories. Although some research has been done in this direction, it is still very much in its early stages. This research project will provide a sustained systematic investigation of the two methods from a unified perspective, and develop novel formal tools to articulate deductively strong theories. 

Kenneth Silver (Trinity College Dublin)
Corporate Moral Progress (€1,371,715)

Within business ethics, there is a longstanding debate concerning Corporate Moral Responsibility, the question of whether corporations themselves are the kinds of things that can be responsible for wrongdoing. Proponents of this view hope to vindicate our sense that firms are the appropriate targets of blame and censure. However, proponents have failed to decisively make their case, and they have also failed to come to terms with the magnitude of corporate wrongdoing. Even if firms are possibly responsible, this is far short of showing that corporations have the sensitivity, incentives, position, to be anything but accidental agents for good, let alone equal members of the moral community. As corporations are some of the most significant actors in modern society, this presents a real problem. If it is right to think that corporations have genuine obligations, then a sincere effort must be made to come to terms with why they fail to meet them as well as how to train firms to behave morally in the future. Corporate Moral Progress aims to do just this—to establish the responsibility of firms, to explore the sources of their immorality, and to chart a path for their improvement. By doing all of this, CMP will pursue concrete ways to improve firms for good.

You can learn more about the grants and see the full set of winners here.