The American Philosophical Association (APA) has announced the winners of several recent prizes.

The winners and their prizes are listed below (descriptions of the prizes are from the American Philosophical Association’s website):

2022 APA/PDC Prize
Outreach Invitational High School Ethics Bowl (Center for Public Philosophy, UC Santa Cruz)

Jointly sponsored with the Philosophy Documentation Center, this prize recognizes philosophy departments, research centers, institutes, societies, publishers, and other organizations for creating programs that risk undertaking new initiatives in philosophy and do so with excellence and success, and to publicize the success of these programs so they may inspire and influence others to follow their lead. The prize includes campus-wide electronic access to a bundle of philosophy resources for an entire year, valued at over $3000.

From the selection committee: This program provides a low-stakes way to introduce students to the Ethics Bowl, in the process conveying to them a sense of belonging at college, making college feel more accessible. With over a dozen schools participating, the success of this program is due to the innovative work of the program administrators and the involvement of undergraduate students and members of the community beyond the university in creating a public forum to advance the public good.

2023 Baumgardt Memorial Fellowship
Elad Uzan (University of Oxford)

Awarded once every three years, this fellowship supports research on topics that have some bearing on the philosophical interests of the late David Baumgardt. Broadly speaking, these interests were in the examination and comparison of types of morality associated with strong cultural and religious traditions, such as Judaism and Christianity, or based on certain contrasting principles (for example, love and justice on the one hand, power or forgiveness on the other). The fellowship amount is $10,000.

From the selection committee: Dr. Uzan’s project that aims at developing a moral and legal framework for the termination of conflict is timely and highly compelling. It is also extremely well-aligned with the prize mandate. Working broadly in the just war tradition, Dr. Uzan makes a persuasive case for considering time or duration as a factor in assessing the morality of armed conflict. It is hard to imagine a more fitting venue for Dr. Uzan’s Baumgardt Memorial lectures on the ethics of ending wars than Oxford University’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.

2024 Arthur Danto/American Society for Aesthetics Prize
Ryan Doran (University of Barcelona/University of Cambridge)
Honorable Mention: John Dyck (Auburn University)

Awarded to a member of the APA and the ASA for the best paper in the field of aesthetics, broadly understood, in a refereed journal, or an original book chapter or original essay published in a collection. The prize is $1000.

From the selection committee: Ryan Doran’s essay “Ugliness Is in the Gut of the Beholder” is an original, wide-ranging, and penetrating analysis of our concept of ugliness that utilizes an impressive range of the empirical literature on emotions. As Doran argues, ugliness is grounded in our disposition to feel disgusted. A fortiori, the aesthetics of ugliness raises some serious ethical questions as the emotion of disgust is also responsible for our tendency to dehumanize and exclude others from the human community. Doran’s article exemplifies the virtues of an interdisciplinary approach to philosophical aesthetics. It is for this very reason that he is a very deserving recipient of this year’s Arthur Danto/American Society for Aesthetics prize.

2024 John Dewey Lectures
Eastern: Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University)
Central: Stephen Darwall (Yale University)

The Dewey Lectures are three annual lectures, one at each divisional meeting of the APA (Eastern, Central, and Pacific), given by a prominent and senior (typically retired) philosopher associated with that Division, who is invited to reflect broadly and in an autobiographical spirit on philosophy in America as seen from the perspective of a personal intellectual journey. The APA publishes the Dewey Lectures each year in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association.

2022 Gittler Award
Gregg Caruso (SUNY Corning)

The Joseph B. Gittler Award is given for an outstanding scholarly contribution in the field of the philosophy of one or more of the social sciences. The range of the social sciences is construed broadly so as to include anthropology, economics, education, government, history, psychology, sociology, and any other field that is normally located within the social science division in contemporary colleges and universities. The prize is $4000.

From the selection committee: The selection committee for the Joseph B. Gittler Award for outstanding scholarly contribution in the field of the philosophy of one or more of the social sciences has enthusiastically selected Gregg Caruso’s, Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice for the 2022 prize. Caruso’s thorough and well-argued book makes the case against retributivist and deterrence-focused justifications for criminal punishment. In their place, he draws on a public health framework in developing a “public health-quarantine model” that prioritizes prevention and social justice. The resulting account accommodates free will skepticism and provides principled constraints on the treatment of criminals. Caruso’s ideas provide the grounds for a thorough and principled reformation of familiar criminal justice systems and his book makes a truly significant contribution to the philosophy of social science.

2022 Hampton Prize
Pascal Brixel (Clemson University/Northwestern University)

The Jean Hampton Prize is awarded biennially to a philosopher at a junior career stage whose paper is accepted for the Pacific Division meeting. The paper must be in some area of philosophy in which Professor Hampton worked, including social and political philosophy, foundations of ethics, normative ethics, the philosophy of law, rational choice theory, feminist theory, Hobbes to Hume, Kant, realism, and pragmatism. The prize is $500.

2024 de Gruyter Kant Lecture
Stephen Darwall (Yale University)

The de Gruyter Kant Lecture Series is offered every year at a divisional meeting on a rotating basis, and the lectures are published in the Proceedings and Addresses. The 2024 Kant Lecture will be the final lecture in this series. The prize includes $1500 plus up to $1500 in travel expenses.

From the selection committee: The selection committee was impressed by the depth and originality of Stephen Darwall’s highly influential engagement with Kant and Kantian themes, particularly in ethics and meta-ethics – an engagement that has spanned more than five decades. Professor Darwall’s many books on these and related topics include Impartial Reason, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’, Philosophical Ethics, Welfare and Rational Care, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability, and Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant. The Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, Professor Darwall has been recognized for his scholarly accomplishments with numerous honors, including election as a fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, election to the Presidency of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

2023 Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize
Kristie Dotson (University of Michigan)
Susanna Siegel (Harvard University)

Awarded by the Phi Beta Kappa Society (ΦBK) in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association (APA), it is presented to a pair of philosophers who hold contrasting (not necessarily opposing) views of an important philosophical question that is of current interest both to the field and to an educated public audience. The prize is $25,000 each. Further details here.

2024 Romanell Lecture
Mark Johnston (Princeton University)

The Patrick Romanell Lecture is presented annually at a divisional meeting of the APA on the topic of philosophical naturalism. The prize is $1200 plus travel expenses of up to $750.

2022 Routledge, Taylor & Francis Prize
W. Clark Wolf (Marquette University)

This prize, funded by the Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, was established in 2013 to recognize the scholarly work of adjunct professors. The prize is awarded for the best published articles in philosophy written by adjunct professors.

Dr. Wolf won the prize for his “Metaphysics Supervenes on Logic: The Role of the Logical Forms in Hegel’s ‘Replacement’ of Metaphysics” (Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2021)

The APA’s press release about the prizes can be found here.