The philosophy department was very busy in Halifax in early June 2026 with the Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA) annual congress and awards for faculty member William Paris for the CPA Book Prize, Tarek Dika for an honourable mention for the book prize, PhD candidate Raphaelle Dupont for the Student Essay Prize, as well as PhD candidate Cassandra Williams, who won the 2026 Richard Hadden Award for best student paper from the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science (CSHPS).
The CPA annual congress, held from June 6 to June 9, 2026, included University Professor Emeritus Wayne Sumner presenting a plenary talk on “Defending Morality.” Other faculty, PhD students, and postdoctoral fellows presenting were
- James Allen (“Ancient Scepticisms and How to Study Them”)
- Rachel Barney (“The History of Western Philosophy of Language before Frege/Russell” and “Knowledge as Technê in Plato’s Republic”)
- Emily Baron (“A Reasonable Excuse? Mental Disorder, Agency, and Excusing Conditions”)
- Dakota Champagne (“Downvotes, Digital Speech Acts, and the Politics of Platform Governance”)
- Gwen Bradford (“The Value of Historical Objects”)
- Joshua Brecka (“Plantinga’s EAAN, Diverse Goals, and Knowledge-First Naturalism”)
- Bowen Chan (“Scaffolded Achievements”)
- Miron J. Clay-Gilmore (Symposium of the Canadian Association for the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence [CAPAI])
- Reza Hadisi (“Friendship, Freedom, and Perfecting Goods”)
- Sanghun Han (“A Puzzle about Observer Memory, and How to Solve It”)
- Danielle Jones (“Aesthetic Experience Beyond the Senses: A Non-Perceptual Principle of Acquaintance”)
- Simone Luigi Migliaro (“Challenging Common Sense: Singular Terms Referring to Many in Late Medieval Thought”)
- Nate Oppel (“The ‘How?’ and ‘Why?’ of Attitude Formation”)
- Martin Pickavé (“Medieval Ethics and Philosophy of Action”)
- Aman Sakhardande (“Astell’s “Proposal”: An Early Critique of Patriarchal Ideology”)
- Julian Sheldon (“Variability and Uncertainty in Punishment”)
- Jasmine Tremblay D’Ettorre (“A Process of Redeeming Hope in the Shawshank Prison”)
- Cameron Yetman (“Language Model Beliefs and Cognitive Self-Governance”)
Williams also presented at CPA and was one of two winners for the Hadden Award, which she received at the CSHPS AGM on the same day. Her paper was titled “Would I Still Have Attention if I was a Worm? Investigating motivational trade-offs and attention in C. Elegans” and was an extract from chapter one of her dissertation. She explains her argument in this way:
“The orthodox view holds that the behaviour of simple organisms, like worms, must amount to mere reflex as opposed to any kind of “decision-making.” I examine the neural mechanism underlying a “trade-off” decision in C. elegans (a microscopic worm with fewer than 1/100,000,000 the neurons of a human) and argue, against the orthodox view, that C. elegans exemplifies behavioural flexibility facilitated by attention, which is more sophisticated than a reflex response.
The upshot for worms is that they deserve more credit: we’ve been too quick to dismiss the possibility of mental processes like attention in simple organisms. But a broader upshot for the study of animal minds is that traditional categories like “reflex” and “cognition” may be hampering our ability to understand non-human animals. To expand our thinking about simple animals, we may also need to expand the conceptual resources brought to bear on studying them.”
Williams has just finished year three of a four-year PhD. The previous winner of the Hadden Award from the department was Bryan Reece for “The Problem of Unbeneficial Features in Aristotle’s Parts of Animals” in 2013.
Finally, Dupont was one of three winners of CPA’s Student Essay Prize for “Spinoza on Identity, Distinctions of Reason, and Ontological Pluralism.” This is how she describes her essay:
“For Spinoza, an idea and its object are famously identical to one another. But what has largely escaped notice is that, for him, they are also rationally distinct from one another. I investigate what this latter claim means, and how it functions together with the identity claim in his system. In particular, I argue that Spinoza’s notion of distinctions of reason cannot be understood along the traditional Cartesian or Suarezian lines, but must instead be reconceived in light of his ontological pluralism—the view that there exist multiple (fundamental) ways of being which a thing can instantiate.”