The Marc Sanders Foundation has awarded its Prize in the History of Early Modern Philosophy to Jordan Lavender (Purdue; soon to be Texas A&M).

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Jordan Lavender

The Sanders Prize in the History of Early Modern Philosophy is a biennial essay competition open to scholars who are within fifteen (15) years of receiving a Ph.D. or students who are currently enrolled in a graduate program. It is administered by Donald Rutherford (UCSD).

Dr. Lavender received the prize for his essay, “The Cartesian Origins of Intentionality: Thought and Sensation as Directio in Thomas Bonarte (1612/13–~1670)”. Here’s an abstract of the paper:

In this paper, I examine the Cartesian philosopher Thomas Bonarte’s (1612/13–c. 1670) claim that the nature of thought and sensation consists in “direction” (directio) towards objects. Bonarte’s account of the nature of thought and sensation as direction in his Concordia scientiae cum fidewas influential in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and was noticed by Leibniz and Antoine Le Grand, among others. However, Bonarte’s views have not yet received sustained attention in contemporary scholarship on seventeenth-century philosophy. After clarifying Bonarte’s view that the nature of thought and sensation consists in direction, I point out that his endorsement of this view complicates a familiar narrative according to which medieval scholastic philosophers saw intentionality as the mark of the mental, while early modern Cartesians took consciousness to occupy this position. I argue that a careful reading of Bonarte’s own account of the relationship between scholasticism and Descartes’s philosophy in the Concordia yields a surprising result: Bonarte’s view that direction is the nature of thought and sensation is both motivated by Bonarte’s commitment to Cartesian theses about minds and bodies and constitutes a genuine break with scholastic accounts of thought and sensation.

The award for the prize-winning essay is $5,000 and publication in Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy.

More information about the prize and a list of previous winners can be found here.