The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced the recipients of its latest grants, and several philosophers are among them.
Readers may recall that in April of this year, many NEH grants were cancelled by Donald Trump’s administration, and grantees and the public were told that the funds they had won were going to be repurposed “in furtherance of the President’s agenda.”
Legal challenges to this have been underway, with the Trump administration seeking dismissal of them. However, just last month a federal judge ruled on First Amendment grounds that some of the grant cancellations should be put off (and the funds for them should not be otherwise spent) until the legal challenges to the cuts are heard in court:
the Court enters a preliminary injunction in Authors Guild, 25cv-3923, staying the April 1-3 Mass Cancellation of grants previously awarded to putative class members in that case and directing pendente lite that any funds associated with those grants not be re-obligated until trial on the merits. The reason is that the class plaintiffs are likely to succeed in establishing that the class members’ grants were terminated in violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act.
Though Trump has said he plans to eliminate the NEH, the agency just announced nearly $35 million in grants.
The philosophy faculty (and their projects) who are among the recipients are:
José Bermudez (Texas A & M University) and Victor Caston (University of Michigan)
Aristotle and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind
• A two-week summer institute for 25 higher education faculty on Aristotle’s psychological writings.
$174,566 (Institutes for Higher Education Faculty).
André Curtis-Trudel (University of Cincinnati)
University of Cincinnati Center for Explainable, Ethical, and Trustworthy AI
• Establishing a humanities research center at the University of Cincinnati on explainability, ethics, and trust in AI. $498,430 (Humanities Research Centers on Artificial Intelligence).
Landon Elkind (Western Kentucky University)
Principia Mathematica’s Second Edition in Its Century, 1925–2025
• Planning and holding a workshop on Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), a foundational text on mathematical logic by British philosophers Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). $49,683 (Collaborative Research).
Chelsea Harry (Southern Connecticut State University)
Aristotelian Paideia and Global Educational Challenges: Revisiting the Past to Plan for Sustainable Education in the 21st-Century
• Planning and holding an international working group meeting and subsequent activities that bring Aristotle’s theories to bear on present-day educational challenges. This collaborative research is with the Interdisciplinary Center for Aristotle Studies at Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, particularly, Prof. Sofia-Eleftheria Gonida, Prof. Emerita Demetra Sfendoni-Mentzou, Dr. Dimitra Balla, and Dr. Christos Pechlivanidis. $25,000 (Collaborative Research).
Andrew Mitchell (Emory University)
Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of The Birth of Tragedy
• Preparation for publication of an English translation of the Unpublished Fragments from the Period of The Birth of Tragedy, volume 10 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). $100,000 (Scholarly Editions and Translations).
Steven Nadler and Grant Nelsestuen (University of Wisconsin)
Center for Humanistic Inquiry into AI and Uncertainty
• Establishing a humanities research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on AI and uncertainty, with particular attention to themes of power, knowledge, and creativity. $220,000 (Humanities Research Centers on Artificial Intelligence).
Alva Noë (University of California, Berkeley), Christian Coseru (College of Charleston, UC Berkeley), and Evan Thompson (University of British Columbia)
Self-Knowledge for Humans and Artificial Systems
• A two-week residential summer institute for 25 higher education faculty to explore the different ways in which self-knowledge is understood in modern Western and Eastern philosophies and artificial intelligence systems. $198,512 (Institutes for Higher Education Faculty).
Darby Vickers, Jennifer Tillman, and Sophia Baik (University of San Diego)
Focusing Policy for Good: Promoting Al for Good for the Disability Community
• Planning and holding a conference on positive AI interventions for the disability community. $50,000 (Collaborative Research).
Alistair Welchman and Mel Webb (University of Texas at San Antonio)*
The Philosophy and Literature Circle: Expanded Discussions in the Community
• Expansion of a public humanities program that fosters a vibrant learning community in which scholars who are incarcerated and university colleagues engage together in sustained exploration of texts and questions in philosophy and literature. $99,961
(If we missed anyone, please let us know.)
The aforementioned grants represent around 8.25% of the total number of NEH grants in this round, and the funds come to around 3.78% of the total amount awarded.
You can view the full list of grant recipients and projects here.
* This grant was awarded after the initial announcement, and was omitted from the original version of this post.
