Congratulations to PhD candidate Sanghun Han, the winner of this year’s Martha Lile Love Essay Award for his paper “A Puzzle about Observer Memory, and How to Solve It.”
The selection committee said of Han’s essay: It “asks how a memory of a first-person experience can be accurate if it is recalled from a third-person perspective. A key element of the experience is inaccurate: the observed perspective from which the event is remembered. The author’s solution involves a fruitful distinction between mereological partiality and phenomenal partiality, between the factual content of an event and the personal experience of the event. . . . The analyses are well-developed, the prose is clear, and the solution is original, with applications beyond the puzzle of observer memory.” The committee considered the paper “a piece of solid philosophical scholarship,” one they hoped “to see in print in a professional journal soon.”
An honorable mention for the prize goes to Jonah Dunch’s essay “The Aspirant Reasons.” The adjudicating committee remarked: “The puzzle addressed in this delightfully written paper is what are the reasons that an aspirant has to grasp of some value, a value which by their own light they do not presently grasp. The paper weaves pop culture, non-western literature and sound philosophy into what is again a delightful and edifying read.”Dunch graduated from the department in 2024 with a master’s degree and is currently a Global Writing and Speaking Fellow a NYU Shanghai.
The Martha Lile Love Essay Award was founded more than forty 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. Past winners of the Martha Lile Love Essay Award include Dennis Klimchuk, Joanna Thoma, Evan Thompson, Eliran Haziza, Liang Zhou Koh, and Henry Krahn.
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