The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the winners of its latest round of “Advanced Grants” and several philosophers are among them.

The grants are all roughly 2.5 million euros each.

The winners and their projects are:

• J. Adam Carter (University of Glasgow)
  “A new framework for theoretical and practical control across intelligence domains”

Knowing what is true is valuable, but practical knowledge—knowledge how to do things—is equally critical. Having such ‘know-how’ enables us to succeed in action, and achieve our goals. Currently, little consensus exists across philosophical and empirical disciplines about the nature of know-how and what is involved in exercising it. Research results are siloed across epistemology, action theory, philosophy of language, and cognitive science, and fundamental disagreement persists about whether research questions about know-how primarily concern cognitive processes or behavioral manifestations. These theoretical barriers hinder our ability to recognize and utilize know-how effectively. The project aims to make a major advance here by developing a comprehensive framework for understanding know-how and its place in a wider web of concepts we rely on to understand and describe intelligent behavior across a range of activities we care about and depend on. A novel hypothesis to be explored is that know-how disposes us not just to success but to creditworthy control. This control, it is proposed, takes a theoretically unified form in both intentional action and judgment, revealing how know-how enhances performance in a structurally symmetrical way when we deliberate and when we act. With minimal metaphysical commitments, the framework applies to both biological and artificial intelligence, avoiding ad hoc explanations and preserving theoretical unification across areas of philosophy that have yet to benefit from each other’s shared resources. The project will put our understanding of know-how on a new footing, impacting academic research across disciplines.

• Russell Friedman (KU Leuven)
  “The Late Scholastic Transformation of Hylomorphism. Philosophical Discussions of Form and Matter in Context, 1400-1600”

By examining issues that dominated hylomorphic discussions in the 15th and 16th centuries, such as prime matter’s actuality and dimensionality, corpuscularianism, and substantial form’s causality, the project’s primary research goal is to give us tools to more accurately assess the novelty of 17th-century matter and form theories. The project’s secondary research goal is to study historically hylomorphic thought 1400-1600 in its intellectual, institutional, and religious context: what role did the growing university system and new groupings like the Jesuits play in the spread of hylomorphic arguments and ideas? How did new impulses like humanism and Reformation affect the discussion? In this way, the project will draw a holistic picture of late scholastic hylomorphic thought and offer historians of 17th-century philosophy and science hitherto neglected background.

• Luca Incurvati (University of Amsterdam)
  “New Foundations for Intensionality”

Intensional notions such as those of property (‘Water has the property of being potable’), content or proposition (‘The content of mental states is less developed in young children than in adults’), provability (‘Some truths are not provable’), possibility and necessity (‘It may be possible to sustain a steady rate of economic growth, but certain courses of action may be necessary’) are central to philosophy, logic, mathematics, linguistics and science more generally. However, these notions are threatened by paradoxes reminiscent of those that plagued the foundations of mathematics at the beginning of the 20th century. And while a consensus has emerged over which shape a foundation of mathematics should take, the intensional paradoxes are still awaiting solution. Indeed, the intensional paradoxes affect the major theories of content that in recent years have brought about what has been hailed as a hyperintensional revolution, with many applications in philosophy and linguistics.

The project aims to provide new philosophical, semantical and logical foundations for intensional notions, which will deliver a comprehensive and uniform solution to the intensional paradoxes. To achieve this, we will develop a fundamentally new approach to intensionality, which will be used to develop new theories and logics of properties, content, proof and modality. As a proof of concept for the new approach to intensionality, we will apply the new theories and logics developed to central philosophical questions, such as the question of whether the mind is a machine.

• Thomas Kjeller Johansen (University of Oslo)
  “The Mathematization of Nature: The Origin of Mathematical Physics in Plato and Early Pythagoreanism”

The project aims to provide a new understanding of the origins of the mathematical world view in the early Pythagoreans, Plato and the Old Academy. 

• Pasquale Porro (University of Turin)
  “Between Fixism and Evolutionism: The Origin of Species in Medieval Thought”

(awaiting details)

• Christian Wüthrich (University of Geneva)
  “At the epistemic frontiers of physics”

Despite the impressive advances of empirical methods in fundamental physics, there is a growing sense that the domain suffers from a crisis in that these methods face serious epistemic limitations. This project offers the philosophical scrutiny this potentially radical redirection in scientific methodology calls for at what may be the dawn of a post-empirical age of theory confirmation. Its ultimate aim is to develop a global perspective on the epistemology of fundamental physics. To this end, it builds on completed work studying whether quantum gravity’s suggestion that our world may not be fundamentally spatiotemporal invalidates its theories as empirically incoherent and focuses on two different central cases in cutting-edge physics. First, it inquires into the extent, and the very legitimacy, of the empirical confirmation of central aspects of the behavior of black holes through analogical reasoning and experimental testing in table-top models. Second, it challenges the extent to which theoretical considerations in cosmology that explain how our world could have come to be so exquisitely fined-tuned as to sustain sapient life can deliver acceptable scientific explanations, produce valid predictions, and offer actual confirmation. The project’s ultimate goal is to articulate a unified epistemology of fundamental physics by integrating the results of these three cases. In particular, it critically evaluates to what extent these cases provide support for a return to a rationalist methodology of science. The project will help build a community of philosophers and physicists articulating the epistemological, methodological, and metaphysical foundations of quantum gravity and cosmology. It will thus deliver epistemological guidance to physics and advance philosophy’s understanding of scientific methodology.

You can see a complete list of the grant winners here.