News Highlights
Read about some of the major achievements by members of the department.
For more news, go to philosophy.utoronto.ca/news/
Undergraduate Honours
St. George students Justin Gharibo (Scotia Capital Markets Bursary in Philosophy), Aman Sakhardande (Thomas J. Lang Scholarship in Philosophy), Thomas Kaufman-Nash (Sunflower Scholarship), Mathieu Duguay (John F. M. Hunter Memorial Scholarship), Charlotte Wun (George Kennedy Scholarship), Jamie Li (John MacDonald Scholarship in Philosophy), and Christine Park (Thomas A. Goudge Scholarship in Philosophy) were awarded scholarships for the 2022–2023 academic year.
Elysa Din was presented with the Dr. Danny Goldstick Award.
UTM students Alex de Guzman earned the Seneca Prize; Jonathan Yeung and Matthew Lam were awarded the Erindale Prize; Eirini Martsoukaki received the André Gombay Prize; Ke Yang Zuo was recognized with the Jacqueline Brunning Award; Alex de Guzman was awarded the Mississauga Prize.
Graduate Honours
Spencer Albert emerged as the winner of the 2022 Martha Lile Love Essay Award for his “How Commodity Fetishism Undermines Desert-Based Arguments against Redistribution and Reparations.”
Andriy Bilenkyy, Alexandra Gustafson, Felix Lambrecht, and Rashad Rehman were honoured with the 2022 Graduate Student Service Awards, each receiving $1,000 in recognition of their outstanding efforts in support of their peers and the departmental climate.
Alexandra Gustafson received the 2022 Martha Lile Love Teaching Award for her exceptional work teaching PHL388—Literature and Philosophy. She was also honoured with a Superior Graduate Student Course Instructor Teaching Award for 2022–2023 from the Faculty of Arts & Science.
Caitlin Hamblin-Yule won a prestigious Congress Graduate Merit Award (CGMA) from the Canadian Philosophical Association for her essay “The Gallows Alien: Extending the Concept <Person> to Non-Human Organisms.”
Damian Melamedoff-Vosters (“The Grounds of Transcendental Idealism”) and Daniel Munro (“Imagining the Actual”) took the 2022 David Savan Dissertation Prize as co-winners.
Eric Shoemaker won the inaugural Erik Olin Wright Prize from the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice at the University of Wisconsin at Madison for his essay “A Justification for Political Random Selection Based on Democratic Equality.”
Defended Dissertations
Jack Beaulieu, “Absence in Nyāya and Mīmāṃ sā” (Jonardon Ganeri)
John Bunke, “Metaphysics in Context” (Gurpreet Rattan)
Lisa Doerksen, “Finding Oneself in the World” (Gurpreet Rattan)
Lu-Vada Dunford, “Terrorism: Killing Bodies to Kill Ideas” (Arthur Ripstein)
Griffin Klemick, “How to Be a Pragmatist in the End: Objectivity, Skepticism, and the Demands of Agency” (Cheryl Misak)
Michaela Manson, “Mind and Prejudice: Cognitive Improvement in the Philosophies of René Descartes and Mary Astell” (Donald Ainslie)
Melissa Rees, “Placebos—Their Nature and Ethical Implications” (Cheryl Misak) Rashad Rehman, “The Ethics of Intersex Pediatric Surgery” (Amy Mullin) Hamish Russell, “Roles and the Filtering of Reasons” (Joseph Heath)
Seyed Yarandi, “Moral Words: Masks for Many Faces” (Gurpreet Rattan)
Faculty Honours
Michael Miller earned a 2022 CNRS—U of T Twin Research Scholars Award (with Vincent Ardourel) for a project titled “New Directions in Philosophy of Physics: Approximation, Precision, and Discreteness.” He also received the Ernest Nagel Early Career Scholar Essay Award from the Philosophy of Science Association for “Infrared Cancellation and Measurement,” published in the journal Philosophy of Science.
Sophia Moreau won a 2022 Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA) Book Prize for her Faces of Inequality: A Theory of Wrongful Discrimination (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her global reputation as a leading scholar of anti-discrimination law also made her the recipient of a 2023 Ludwik and Estelle Jus Memorial Human Rights Prize (Influential Leader) from the University of Toronto Alumni Association.
Jennifer Nagel was awarded the 2023 Ernest Sosa Prize Lecture by the American Philosophy Association (APA).
Christian Pfeiffer was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure.
Arthur Ripstein was recognized with the 2022 Journal of the History of Philosophy Prize for his Kant and the Law of War (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Andrew Sepielli received a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellowship for the academic year 2023–24 from Princeton University’s Center for Human Values.
Book Publications
Tarek R. Dika and Martin Shuster, eds., Religion in Reason: Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics in Hent de Vries (New York: Routledge, 2022).
Joseph Heath, Cooperation and Social Justice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022).
Waheed Hussain, Living with the Invisible Hand: Markets, Corporations, and Human Freedom, edited by Arthur Ripstein and Nicholas Vrousalis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
Mark Kingwell, Singular Creatures: Robots, Rights, and the Politics of Posthumanism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).
Karl Schafer and Nicholas F. Stang, eds., The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds: New Essays on Kant’s Metaphysics and Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
Andrew Sepielli, Pragmatist Quietism: A Meta-Ethical System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
Of Further Note
A generous donation by Charles Morgan will enhance student success for the near future. During the coming five years, the Pronovost Morgan Family Foundation Fellowship in Ethical AI will financially support academically outstanding graduate students working in the fields of artificial intelligence or big data.
For UNESCO World Philosophy Day 2022, we welcomed Agnes Callard (Chicago), who delighted with a lecture titled “The City of Idiots.”
The tri-campus U of T Department of Philosophy—in institutional partnership with Carleton, Guelph, McMaster, Queen’s, and Western Universities—organized an expanded and vibrant Ontario High School Ethics Bowl on the UTM campus on March 4–5, 2023. It was the fourth of its kind and the first one to bring participants together in person since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
F. Michael Walsh, an outstanding friend of the department, ranked among 14 eminent individuals to receive an honorary degree from the University of Toronto this year. The honour recognized his commitment to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, especially his transformative gift of the Walsh Philosophy Collection.