With great pleasure we announce that Eliran Haziza has emerged as the winner of this year’s Martha Lile Love Essay Award for his essay titled “Asserting, Implying, and Knowing That You Know.” In the piece, Eliran argues that if one accepts a knowledge norm of assertion, according to which one may assert only if one knows, there is pressure to accept the view that you may assert only if you can assert that you know, and that this in turn supports a KK principle — that knowing requires knowing that you know. Eliran also argues that if one accepts a knowledge norm of assertion, then one should also accept a knowledge norm for implying, where implying includes, broadly, conveying information beyond that which is asserted. He then uses this conclusion then to support the view that knowing requires knowing that you know. The paper challenges the popular combination of views according to which one should accept a knowledge norm of assertion, but reject the view that knowing requires knowing that you know. Amid a large and very strong field of contenders, the essay stood out in particular for the clarity and force of its argument and the significance of its conclusion.
We would also like to draw attention to one honourable mention, for our former master’s student James Gignac and his essay “Plato’s Gorgias: The Power Argument.” James’s essay interprets and defends Socrates’s argument that tyrants and orators have the least power of anyone in the city. The interpretation and defence turns on a very clever interpretation of Socrates’s distinction between being able to do what one sees fit and being able to do what one wills. The paper stood out for its patient development of Socrates’s elusive argument and its ability to lend intuitive plausibility to Socrates’s counterintuitive conclusion.
Many thanks to Franz Huber and Michael Rosenthal for serving on the adjudication committee for the award. We would like to join them in congratulating Eliran and James, as well as the other excellent nominees, for their terrific work.
The Martha Lile Love Essay Award was founded 40 years ago to honour the memory of a Toronto graduate student, Martha Lile Love, who had herself won an essay prize at Smith College, where she completed her undergraduate degree in philosophy. Past winners of the Martha Lile Love Essay Award include Dennis Klimchuk, Jane Friedman, Achille Varzi, and Evan Thompson.
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