We are delighted to announce Alexander de Guzman as the winner of this year’s Martha Lile Love Essay Award for his paper, “Outsourced Deliberation: Attention, Advertising, and the Myth of Control.” He wrote the essay for an independent study with Sara Aronowitz.
The selection committee noted about the award-winning essay, “The paper takes as its target what the author calls ‘In-House Deliberativism’ (IHD), the view that deliberation is an internal process entirely under the control of the deliberating subject.” According to IHD, factors external to the deliberating agent can only affect the deliberative process by constraining what is practically possible, or through endorsement by a gated internal process. Guzman argues that in fact external processes can exert deliberative influence involuntarily, without any kind of conscious endorsement. The committee concluded: “We were impressed by (and thoroughly enjoyed reading) this very engaging paper, which stood out for its ambition and insight.”
An honorable mention goes to Aman Sakhardande for “Is Time an a priori Representation? Locke contra Kant,” an essay written for a seminar led by Nick Stang. The selection committee remarked: “We were especially struck by the clarity of the author’s prose and his ability to make a complex dialectic intelligible to the reader.”
Congratulations to both successful authors!
The Martha Lile Love Essay Award was established more than 40 years ago to honor the memory of Martha Lile Love, a Toronto student who won an essay prize at Smith College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Last year’s winner was Chi-ho Hung, and previous winners of the Martha Lile Love Essay Award include Jane Friedman, Eliran Haziza, Nathan Howard, Dennis Klimchuk, Henry Krahn, Karin Nisenbaum, Evan Thompson, and Achille Varzi.
