The Independent Research Fund of Denmark has awarded two large grants to projects led by philosophers.

The projects are:

• Understanding Experiences of Mood Disturbances in Depression

Principal Investigator: Anthony Vincent Fernandez, Assistant Professor of Applied Philosophy in the Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics and Fellow at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Southern Denmark.

Award: DKK 6,028,887 (approximately $910,000)

Description: As a diagnostic category, depression does not capture a single disease entity or a consistent syndrome. Rather, it likely includes a heterogeneity of conditions that are not adequately distinguished, undermining research into distinct causes and novel interventions. To address this problem, the project aims to develop a more precise taxonomy of mood disturbances experienced by people with depression, disambiguating poorly defined concepts such as “depressed mood”. To do so, it employs a novel combination of philosophy and qualitative research methods, including in-depth interviews with people diagnosed with depression, a large-scale survey of how practicing psychiatrists understand mood disturbances in depression, and conceptual analysis and development based on the newly generated empirical data. The project will include a postdoc in psychology, a Ph.D. student in philosophy, external partners in neuropsychiatry at Columbia University, and an international advisory board of philosophers, clinical psychologists, and psychiatrists.

Anthony Vincent Fernandez and Lasse Nielsen

• The Morality of Extreme Wealth

Principal Investigator: Lasse Nielsen, Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Design, Media and Educational Science and Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and Ethics of Health at the University of Southern Denmark.

Award: DKK 6,190,416 (approximately $935,000)

Description: Poverty and inequality are central themes in political philosophy. Whereas distributive justice research traditionally concerns problems with having too little or less than others, the study of morality in the high end of the scale is still underdeveloped. In praticular, current theories of distributive justice fail to capture what is distinctively problematic about extreme wealth. Building on the important reaserch of Ingrid Robeyns’ limitarianism, this project contributes to filling this gap, first, by exploring how moral reasons to worry about inequality and poverty are transformed when wealth becomes extreme and, second, by building new theory on the morality of extreme wealth. The project aims at three significant academic contributions: (1) to explore and map out distinctive moral reasons to be concerned with extreme wealth from the perspective of distributive justice, (2) to analyze the role of individual responsibility in a theory of extreme wealth morality, and (3) to evaluate the moral obligations of the extremely wealthy in a society with existing injustices. The project is a collaboration between University of Southern Denmark and University of Essex. It will include a postdoc in moral philosophy and a Ph.D. student in political theory.

You can learn more about other projects funded by the Independent Research Fund of Denmark here.