Giacomo Molinari, a PhD student at the University of Bristol, has won the 2024 Isaac Levi Prize.

The Levi Prize is awarded every three years for an article submitted to The Journal of Philosophy by a current philosophy graduate student or scholar who has received a Ph.D. within the past two years, on a topic that was of interest to the philosopher for whom the prize is named, Isaac Levi. These topics include decision theory, epistemology, formal epistemology, pragmatism, philosophy of science, social choice theory, ethics of controversy, and the relevance of philosophy in these areas to public life.

Mr. Molinari won the prize for his paper, “Deference Principles for Imprecise Credences”. Here’s the abstract:

This essay gives an account of epistemic deference for agents with imprecise credences. I look at the two main imprecise deference principles in the literature, known as Identity Reflection and Pointwise Reflection. I show that Pointwise Reflection is strictly weaker than Identity Reflection, and argue that, if you are certain you will update by conditionalization, you should defer to your future self according to Identity Reflection. Then I give a more general justification for Pointwise and Identity Reflection from the assumption that you defer to someone whenever you consider their doxastic state to be better than yours, in the sense of leading to better decision-making.

The prize is $10,000. Mr. Molinari’s article will be published in the March 2025 issue of the Journal of Philosophy. 

The prize was endowed by Levi’s surviving family. The prize committee consists of Akeel Bilgrami, Jessica Collins, Haim Gaifman, Philip Kitcher, Cheryl Misak, Carol Rovane, Nils-Eric Sahlin, Teddy Seidenfeld, Scott J. Shapiro, Gila Sher, Rush Stewart, Anubav Vasudevan, and Achille C. Varzi.

(via Alyssa Timin)