News
Professor Achille Varzi is the recipient of the Mark Van Doren Teaching Award for the academic year 2022-2023. Columbia College awards the Mark Van Doren Teaching Award. The award is to recognize a faculty member's humanity and inspiring leadership. For information about the Mark Van Van Doren Teaching Award, please visit Columbia College.
The Jean Nicod Prize is annually awarded between philosophers and philosophically-oriented scientists. For more information about the Jean Nicod Prize, please click here.
Columbia News interviewed John Dewey Emeritus Professor of Philosophy Philip Kitcher about his new book on John Stuart Mill as part of the Columbia "Core Knowledge" series. Here is the link to the article.
Project Title: Standard Research Grant: Representation and Inference in the Brain
The goal of this three-year project is to develop useful and precise definitions of ‘representation’ and ‘inference’ for attribution to the brain. Representation and inference are central notions in neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy, but they have not yet been rigorously defined in terms of neural activity. All three fields would benefit from such definitions. For example, neuroscientists often describe neural activity as representing and inferring. It is their way of describing the overall function of that activity, an abstraction away from detailed neural recordings. But, because there are no rigorously definitions, there are no objective grounds for these descriptions. As a result, they are treated as casual glosses rather than as rigorous analyses. Just as proper definitions accelerated progress in other fields, proper definitions of ‘representation’ and ‘inference’ have the potential to accelerate progress in neuroscience.
Francey Russell is one of four junior faculty to receive a Society of Fellows and Heyman Center Fellowship for 2023-2024. Professor Russell's project is entitled "Opaque Animals," and articulates a conception of human self-opacity grounded in Kant and Freud, and in contemporary debates in philosophical moral psychology, psychoanalysis, and works of art.
Elizabeth Benn was named the director of Major League Operations for the New York Mets. Elizabeth made franchise history by becoming the highest ranking female employee in baseball operations. Elizabeth received her M.A. in Philosophy in 2017.
The Philosophy Department was deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Professor Joseph Raz. A beloved friend of the department, Joseph was a member of the Columbia Law School faculty and world-renowned legal philosopher whose prolific and influential scholarship offered new insights into the nature of law and legal reasoning, as well as the relationship between law, morality, and freedom, died on May 2 at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He was 83.
Congratulations to Jonathan Tanaka for being 2022 recipient of the prestigious Beinecke Scholarship. Columbia College posted a story about Jonathan Tanaka, and information about the Beinecke scholarship.
Congratulations to Christopher Peacocke for being one of three philosophers to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
The Hempel Award is the highest award that philosophers of science can receive for their contribution to the field.
Congratulations to Andrew Richmond for receiving the 2020 Siff Award for his essay titled, "How Computation Explains".
Allison will be joining the Columbia faculty on July 1, 2021 after completing a Bersoff Faculty Fellow position at NYU. Her areas of specialization are Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and Early Modern philosophy.
On April 29, 2021, Professor Robert Gooding-Williams was the inaugural recipient for Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Social Philosophy.