Awards

Philosophy Class Prizes

It’s my pleasure to congratulate Olivia Kamminga as the winner of the Third-Year Philosophy Class Prize open to all third-year philosophy majors and minors. Olivia took my social and political philosophy course, where her work displayed precise and rigorous thinking paired with keen insight into social justice issues. It was no surprise, then, that Olivia was nominated three times for the prize. Phil Beriault writes, “Olivia was one of the most eager and passionate students I’ve had the joy of teaching.  She came into the course with a clear interest in the subject, and her enthusiasm would often contribute greatly to making class an engaging place of philosophy.” Katy Fulfer writes that “every undergraduate chair should be blessed with a student such as Olivia. She was instrumental in restarting PhilSoc and has gone above and beyond when I have needed someone to speak with prospective students.” Congratulations, Olivia! And thank you for your contributions to philosophy! — Chris Lowry.

Second Year: Kyra Woodend 

Congratulations on your award! You quite impressed me with careful and thoughtful reflections, and you always seemed ready and eager to learn and discuss more.  You demonstrated patience and willingness to ponder issues and ideas in great detail and took care to make sure that your thoughts and positions reflected this patience and attention to detail.  Your final essay clearly demonstrated your skills for careful and detailed reflection, developing an argument for an extended mind that was able to make thoughtful and illuminating connections to ideas and thinkers covered throughout the course. — Phil Beriault.

First Year: Eunice Ho 

Eunice excelled in Epistemology and Metaphysics, demonstrating a knack for asking thought-provoking questions and a zest for philosophical learning. Throughout the course, Eunice made key contributions to our class discussions and crafted outstanding papers. — Ian MacDonald.

Department Special Prize: Grace Beach 

"I've been privileged to teach Grace in several classes and I always appreciate the contributions she makes to each class. Grace enthusiastically embraces all learning experiences. She engages meaningfully with the course concepts, she’s generous in her interactions with her classmates, and she continually strives to improve and grow through the course materials and assignments. Grace has enriched the Gender and Social Justice program and I wish her the best of luck with her future endeavours." — Shannon Stettner.

Philosophy Undergraduate Essay Prize

Gold: Yvan Deslauriers 

For: “Manufacturing Misunderstanding: Legault’s persistent denial of systemic racism as complex hermeneutical impasse” 

Yvan is warmly thanked for his hard work and congratulated for his multiple achievements in Jennifer Saul's video above. 

Silver: Nicholas Lemoing

For: “Online Surveillance and Privacy Rights” 

"In many ways, we all live in a fishbowl. Sometimes, the online surveillance we are subjected to is without our knowledge, other times we have blithely agreed by clicking “Accept” with little thought for the consequences. Nicholas comes at the subject of online privacy and surveillance with knowledge about software design, and how companies and institutions like to gather as much data as possible, as well as from the perspective of a citizen keen to have his rights respected and his privacy maintained. Well-researched and well-written, his paper argues for ways in which all of us might have our privacy strengthened moving forward, all the while with a keen eye on such human weaknesses as greed, irrationality, and short-term bias in thought and action." — Brian Orend.

Bronze: Kapil Bilimoria

For: “The Morality and Legality of Autonomous Weapons Systems”

"In the past several years, a new weapons system has been developed and deployed: that of the so-called “autonomous weapons system.” Think, e.g., of advanced and armed drones which are run by software pre-programmed to identify correct- from incorrect targets, and then to deploy killing force automatically, without any further, or final, say-so by a responsible human being. The military advantages of such a weapons system can be considerable, as they are not subject to human fatigue and error on-the-spot, yet they raise obvious concerns regarding lack of accountability and the likelihood of mistaken targeting and, thus, wrongful killing. Kapil writes an excellent paper here, well-researched and cited, deploying a knowledgeable and mature analysis of these weapons systems, ultimately arguing for their permissibility." —Brian Orend.

Philosophy Graduate Essay Prize

Gold: Jim Jordan

For: “Cyber jus in Bello: The Problem of Protecting Data and Cyberobjects”

"In this engaging chapter of his Ph.D. dissertation, Jim Jordan breaks new ground in the cyberwar literature by considering the impacts which cyberattacks might have on the physical well-being of civilians in the target country. Jim argues that the dangers are sharper than they might seem, and extend beyond mere cyber-harms (e.g., frozen laptops) to include physical- and financial harms (e.g., identity theft, stolen health data, etc.). Jim argues that an especially potent and vulnerable target concerns the basic governmental records about all of us which are crucial for us accessing the most basic social services: education, health care, driver’s licenses, passports, etc. He points out that we need such data to access the objects of our human rights claims. Sadly, today’s conflict in Ukraine shows that these pieces of data are in fact highly sought after by belligerents, as they know full well the chaos they can cause in society by stealing and destroying or altering such data. This is an important, eloquent, well-researched original contribution to just war- and international law thinking." —Brian Orend.

Silver: Andrew Allison

For: “Towards a Dependency Based Approach to Fiduciary Duty During Corporate Insolvency” 

Andrew, congratulations on your award! I really appreciate how you brought care theory into conversation with your interest in the philosophy of money and business ethics. In this paper, Andrew employed care ethics to sketch out a dependency-based approach to managers’ fiduciary duties during corporate insolvency, contrasting this novel alternative with dominant approaches in the literature. His research expands the scope of how care ethics intersects with business ethics, which has been mostly focused on areas such as managerial and leadership ethics. I was also pleased that this research sparked another research project on managerial obligations during insolvency, which Andrew presented at the 2022 annual conference of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. — Katy Fulfer.

Bronze: Kathryn Morrison

For: “Mature Minors Eligibility for Medical Assistance in Dying”

Kerr-Lawson: Leanne Woodward

For: “Racial Data in Canadian Health Research”

Haworth Prize: Maryam Mughal

For: “The Bus at Seven O’clock”

Congratulations to Alice Sandiford on being awarded the Shamim Mapara Philosophy Scholarship, which recognizes academic excellence in multidisciplinary studies and recognizes a student’s holistic approach to learning. We are grateful to Nina Mapara (BSc ’94, BA ’96) for funding this award in honour of her mother.

Alice is a fourth-year Arts & Business student who is majoring in Peace and Conflict Studies and is minoring in Philosophy. Alice brings her interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to her studies, leadership in her academic programs, as well as her community work around climate change and Indigenous law. We cannot wait to see what is next for Alice as she embarks on graduate studies at Osgoode Hall Law School! —Katy Fulfer.

Usually, at the end of an academic year, we gather together for the Department Awards Ceremony. We are very sorry to miss doing so this year! In place of that, we are celebrating our students through a series of videos and text. 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. In particular, for years Bob Ewen, a valued Philosophy alumnus, 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. These awards make such a difference not only to our students, but also to our broader community, which 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. Thank you, Bob Ewen, for making these awards possible.

First Year Prize - Mark Buchnea (co-winner)

Congratulations, Mark! Your expositions were careful and accurate while your argumentation was convincing and clear. I was very impressed with both of the essays that you wrote in PHIL 101 and I can't think of anybody more deserving of this First Year Class Prize. I hope you continue to flex your philosophical muscles! (Vanessa Correia)

First Year Prize - Samantha Moser (co-winner)

Second Year Prize - Olivia Kamminga 

Olivia is a bright student capable of making connections between disparate philosophical ideas. Olivia regularly finds connections between bits of course material, or between course material and things she is learning elsewhere, that are illuminating for her peers and her professors! Olivia recently took a philosophy of law course with me. She started off doing solid work and then continued on an upward trajectory as she explored the material with her iterative writing assignments. Her final term paper was one of the best I have had the pleasure to read in the philosophy of law, even though she was taking a third-year course as a second-year student. She critically addressed the law’s naturalization of Whiteness by focussing on the history of anti-Asian labour law, the use of White women’s experience as a baseline for Black women’s claims of sexual discrimination, and the erasure of Indigenous women in Canadian law (focussing especially on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls). The connections she made between Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality and Pam Palmater’s theoretical and activist work on Indigenous women as the focus of police neglect or hostility, were exemplary. Congratulations Olivia! (Nicholas Ray)

Third Year Prize - Nicholas Lee

Fourth Year Prize - Ezri Chernak

Undergraduate Essay Prize: Gold Medal

Undergraduate Essay Prize: Silver Medal

The Aesthetic Value of Process and Practice – Rebecca Joy Dunk

Undergraduate Essay Prize: Bronze Medal

Ezri Chernak - Intricate Lies: Implications for the Philosophy of Deception in Alice Munro’s Pictures of the Ice

Huge congratulations to Ezri. His essay was wonderfully original, using a literary work to provide a vivid, engaging example as the focus of his discussion. This example provided a fascinating and challenging counterexample for many theories of the wrongness of deception.  I learned a lot from the essay and really enjoyed reading it. Fantastic work! (Jenny Saul)

Graduate Essay Prize: Gold Medal

Being Pluralistic About Expertise: Making Sense of the Knowledge Gained From Lived Experience – Janet Jones

Graduate Essay Prize: Silver Medal

Can a union theory of love help re-conceptualize addiction – Ashley Raspopovic 

I’m delighted that Ashley Raspopovic won the Silver medal graduate essay prize. Ashley’s paper “Can a union theory of love help re-conceptualize addiction?” explores the ways in which love and addiction often serve as metaphors for one another. Ashley asks whether the metaphors of love can help advance the debate between the competing disease and choice models of addiction. The paper is great—it’s engagingly written, rigorously argued, and displays an impressive grasp of the literature across a range of sub-disciples, from psychiatry and neuroscience to the philosophy of love. What most impresses me about the paper is Ashley’s philosophical creativity: they bring together ideas in really novel and fruitful ways, all in the service of a compelling conclusion. Congratulations Ashley! (Mathieu Doucet)

Graduate Essay Prize: Bronze Medal

The need for normative transparency in the pursuit of algorithmic accountability - Artur Lukaszczyk 

Congratulations to Artur Lukaszczyk for winning the Bronze Essay Prize for his paper on "The need for Normative Transparency in the Pursuit of Algorithmic Accountability"! Increasingly, artificial intelligence is used in a range of social processes, helping to determine who gets a job, who is approved for a loan, how insurance premiums are set, and so on. Critics have pointed out that such processes have a problem with lack of transparency: often the general public lacks access to the data and to the algorithmic design, and by nature, algorithmic methods can obscure the reasons or explanations for a given output. In this paper, Artur gives a novel approach to understanding calls for transparency that focuses on its normative aspects -- what outcome is the algorithm trying to predict, and why? What data was included or rejected, and why?

Artur's excellent paper presents an original, creative, and informed analysis of normative transparency. Artur wrote this paper during a 2020 Research Area - these Areas are intensive one-on-one studies that Ph.D. students complete with a supervisor before they move on to doing their dissertation. During the lockdown, Artur and I connected virtually, and we had lots of rich conversations about algorithms and the values implicit in their use. Great work, Artur! (Patricia Marino)

Angus Kerr-Lawson Essay Prize

Special Prize for Contributions to the Intellectual Life of the Department

The Lawrence Haworth Prize - Lauren Pazzano & Gillian Belcher

The Lawrence Haworth Prize in Philosophy was made possible through a generous donation from Philosophy alumnus Michael Mitias in honour of Distinguished Professor Emeritus Lawrence Haworth. Selection is based on excellence in writing by an undergraduate on a theme related to Public Philosophy. Dr. Mitias received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Waterloo in 1971, supervised by Dr. Haworth, and this prize is intended to honor Professor Haworth's practical wisdom, philosophical spirit, and intellection generosity. Thank you, Dr. Mitias, for funding this award. 

Lauren and Gillian, congratulations on being awarded the first Lawrence Haworth Prize in Philosophy for your educational blog titled “Taking Action: Reading Hannah Arendt in Contemporary Times.”

You introduce your blog by saying that philosophy should be accessible to everyone and that barriers such as time, money, or institutional degrees should not prohibit people from studying philosophy. Your blog weaves put Hannah Arendt’s philosophy into conversation with pressing political questions that we face today.

In the Human Condition, her seminal work of political philosophy, Hannah Arendt says that her task “is very simple. It is nothing more than to think what we are doing” (p. 5). You’ve done precisely that, introducing Arendt to readers as well as analyzing pressing social justice questions: climate strikes, voluntourism, and statelessness.

Re-visiting your blog, I was particularly struck by your analysis of diversity work within institutions. Your project was written before the UW committed to re-examining racism within its structures before they committed to the creation of a Black Studies program. Your analysis is so relevant for thinking through how to do that work well, and how our institutions ought to be accountable.

One final word: by naming your blog “Taking Action,” you have encouraged your readers to see theory and practice as deeply intertwined. We think about what we are doing so we can be more change-makers in the world. Well done, and once again, congratulations. (KatyFulfer)

The Shamim Mapara Philosophy Scholarship

Usually, we would gather at the end of the Winter term for our Department Awards Ceremony. The ceremony had to be canceled 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!

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!”

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 Pihlström 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 Pihlström 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)