Usually we would gather at the end of Winter term for our Department Awards Ceremony. The ceremony had to be cancelled this year, but we still have deserving prize winners to celebrate! The Philosophy Awards Committee received many strong nominations for these prizes and had difficult decisions to make.
These awards are made possible by generous donors. We are deeply appreciative of their support. For years, Bob Ewen has donated toward making the class prizes and essay prizes possible, and recently Bob gifted to our Department an endowed fund that will support these awards for years to come. Thank you, Bob! We’d also like to thank the friends and family of former faculty member Angus Kerr-Lawson for funding the Kerr-Lawson essay prize.
With these gifts, not only does the money make such an important difference to the students, but in addition our community benefits so much from the supportive message of the gifts themselves — that in these difficult times, what we are doing has meaning beyond the classroom. The awards also allow us to come together, even if only in virtual space!
Philosophy Undergraduate Class Prizes
First Year Prize – Kyra Kestrel (co-winner)
Kyra was one of the top students in PHIL 101 in Winter 2020. Jackie Feke describes Kyra as “very engaged in the class-wide discussions” and notes that Kyra’s performance on the tests was outstanding.
First Year Prize – Layla Hussain (co-winner)
Layla was a top student in both PHIL 101 and PHIL 121 this year. For PHIL 121, Mathieu Doucet comments that “Layla’s term paper on the ethics of eating animals was polished, thoughtful, and philosophically sophisticated.”
Second Year Prize – Stuart Morden
Stuart’s performance in PHIL courses this year was uniformly strong. Stuart’s term paper for PHIL 251 Metaphysics and Epistemology on McDowell’s critique of coherentism is described by Doreen Fraser as “standing out for its clear explanations and clear and compelling analysis of the arguments.”
Third Year Prize – Ezri Chernak
Ian MacDonald shares that “Ezri made a series of intelligent and important contributions to our class, PHIL 324 Social and Political Philosophy, revealing to me how dedicated he is to philosophical thinking and how excellent he is as a student.” And from Mathieu Doucet: “As just a 3rd year student, Ezri was an active and valuable contributor to the PHIL 420 Addiction seminar, and wrote an excellent paper on policing and addiction in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.”
Fourth Year Prize – Clair Baleshta
Clair is a Philosophy minor who excelled in many Philosophy classes this year. Mathieu Doucet explains that “In a group of strong students— including several graduate students— Clair’s work in the PHIL 420 Addiction seminar stood out for its insights, its careful attention to detail, and its charitable and constructive approach to the important topics it engaged.” Nick Ray reflects that “Every professor hopes to see a student like Clair in the classroom: someone who is always active in class discussion, who writes the most amazing papers, and who shows her leadership in group work. She cares deeply about the material, which is readily apparent when examining her work!”
Philosophy Essay Prizes
Undergraduate Essay Prize: Gold Medal
Clair Baleshta, “Clarifying the Civil Rights and Liberties Conflict through an Appeal to Relational Autonomy” for PHIL 327 Philosophy of Law
Clair argues that civil liberties rest on a traditional view of autonomy, whereas civil rights are predicated upon a more relational understanding of autonomy. Drawing on work in legal philosophy by Richard Delgado and the recent relational autonomy literature in ethics and political philosophy, Clair deftly argues that conflicts between civil liberties and civil rights are inevitable because of these differing conceptions of autonomy; but knowing this fact helps us diagnose and mediate such conflicts, as opposed to ignoring or downplaying their significance. (Nick Ray)
Undergraduate Essay Prize: Silver Medal
Hai-Dao Le-Nguyen, “Reframing ‘functioning’: the neurodiversity paradigm and doulia” for PHIL 422 Justice and Disability
Hai-Dao’s paper exhibits her everpresent concern with social justice and her skill at bringing several lines of thought into productive conversation. She makes use of ideas about neurodiversity and epistemic authority in order to provide a sympathetic critique of Kittay’s modifications of Rawls’s account of justice, in support of Autistic persons’ autonomy and self-advocacy. (Chris Lowry)
Undergraduate Essay Prize: Bronze Medal
Benjamin Ang, “Modal representationalism as an integration of traditional representationalism and new theories of embodied cognition” for PHIL 256 Intro to Cognitive Science
This paper offers an excellent and concise overview of the schism between the dominant and traditional computational-representational theory of mind (CRTM), and embodied theories of cognition that have placed pressure on the CRTM over the past 20 or 30 years. Ben couples an impressive understanding of the theoretical terrain with recent empirical work in order to find a mid-way position (“modal representationalism”) that seeks to blend the best of traditional and embodied theories of cognition, while nicely avoiding the pitfalls of other attempts to synthesize the two frameworks. (Nick Ray)
Graduate Essay Prize: Gold Medal
Jay Solanki, Chapter 1 of “Harm Reduction is a Social Movement”
The thesis offers an assiduously researched history of harm reduction and a sophisticated argument for understanding harm reduction as a critical, peer-based, grassroots social movement rather than a mechanism of public health policy and practice. The winning chapter surveys the history of harm reduction and scans the philosophical literature on harm reduction in order to map the very different extant characterizations of just what harm reduction is. This chapter, like the thesis as a whole, is a remarkable piece of scholarship — sophisticated, nuanced, challenging, and rich. (Shannon Dea)
Graduate Essay Prize: Silver Medal
Ashley Raspopovic, “Dogwhistles and figleaves: The function of high-BMI terms”
This is a really wonderful original paper that carefully develops the ways in which terms like ‘overweight’ and ‘obese’ serve to dogwhistle stigmatizing attitudes. It then goes even further, looking at ways that medical contexts provide fig leaves that obscure the way that these terms stigmatize. It is very much a publishable piece of work. (Jenny Saul)
Graduate Essay Prize: Bronze Medal
Scott Metzger, “Overcoming The Normative Divide In Constructionist Critique: Description, Amelioration, and Pragmatism”
In his lively and stimulating paper, Scott argues that the pragmatism of Peirce, Putnam, and Pihlstrom get us past the normative divide by collapsing the dichotomy between fact and value. The paper is beautifully organized and deftly argued. Scott weaves such disparate figures as Haslanger, Hume, and Pihlstrom together amazingly well. (Shannon Dea)
Angus Kerr-Lawson Essay Prize: Awarded in honour of former faculty member Angus Kerr-Lawson for the best undergraduate or graduate paper in American or naturalistic philosophy
Angella Yamamoto, “Eliminativist Ontic Relevant Relationalism”
This highly original paper evaluates the prospects of structural realism as an account of representation in biology. This is novel because structural realism has primarily been applied to scientific theories in which mathematical structures play a central role in representing the world. Angella’s paper offers a careful and compelling analysis that attends to different versions of structural realism and arguments raised by critics, as well as the messy details of biological processes. (Doreen Fraser)