Congratulations to the recipients of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grant competition. Read about the 12 projects below. The department set a record for most successful applications in one year!
The successful colleagues are Donald Ainslie, David Barnett, Mike Caie, Jessica Gelber, Reza Hadisi, Joe Heath, Peter King, Andrew Lee, Julia Nefsky and Sergio Tenenbaum, Arthur Ripstein, Marleen Rozemond, and Sonia Sedivy.
Donald Ainslie
The role of nationality, socioeconomic status, race and sex have been at the centre of significant recent work in social ontology among contemporary metaphysicians. Yet these questions about social kinds were the focus of intense debate among a group of 18th century British philosophers, known as the “British Moralists.” Ainslie’s project begins with a focus on David Hume’s views on rank in relation to other philosophers such as Bernard Mandeviille, Adam Smith, and John Millar, but will also delve into issues regarding nationality as a social kind and how it was applied to sex and race through texts by writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Olaudah Equiano. The outcomes of the project is a series of papers on how the British Moralists treated rank, nationality, race, and sex, building towards a book, which will be the first monograph to address social ontology and the British Moralists.
David Barnett
David Barnett’s project is a book on self-consciousness and its significance for epistemology. Its animating problem is a tension between two perspectives one can adopt, one’s ordinary subjective perspective on the world, and a self-conscious perspective that includes oneself and one’s ordinary perspective as parts of the world. He thinks the self-conscious perspective is in a certain sense alienating, and the project is to develop a better understanding of alienation and its role in driving central epistemological issues ranging from skepticism to social epistemology.
Mike Caie
A number of deep and challenging philosophical puzzles turn centrally on the meanings of names. Two such puzzles concern, respectively, the use of meaningful empty names and the failure of certain co-denoting names to be intersubstitutable in certain sentences. These two puzzles pose a significant challenge for Millianism—the dominant account in philosophy of the meaning of names. And while these puzzles are easily handled by Descriptivism—a historically notable alternative account of names—this theory is known to have other significant problems. A new idea is needed. Recently, there has been a wave of work at the intersection of philosophical logic and metaphysics that uses the resources of higher-order logic to formulate philosophical theories and shed light on traditional philosophical problems. Caie’s project on names and higher order logic aims to show how we can make significant progress in resolving these and related puzzles by using the resources of higher-order logic.
Jessica Gelber
Aristotle’s natural teleology—his belief that natural processes are goal-directed, or have “final causes”—is arguably one of his most famous and influential philosophical theories. Yet there remains much scholarly disagreement there remains about why he thinks teleological explanations are essential.
The centerpiece of Jessica Gelber’s project, “Rethinking Aristotelian Necessity: A New Interpretation of Ex Hupotheseôs Necessity,” is what is usually called “conditional” or “hypothetical” (ex hupotheseôs) necessity. She argues that this is not a distinctive kind of necessity specifically associated with teleology, contrary to what is standardly believed. That mistaken assumption, has led to serious misunderstandings—and sometimes caricatures—of Aristotle’s commitment to teleology. At its root, that commitment has nothing to do with a special kind of necessitation that “flows backward” from ends to the things that bring them about. Rather, it rests on some plausible views about the structure of scientific explanation: Aristotle thinks teleological explanations are indispensable because only they appeal to the genuine explanatory starting points—the fundamental principles of living things that explain why their other characteristics are present.
Reza Hadisi
Reza Hadisi is working on a book project that explores the idea of a “world of images” central to several strands of post-Avicennan philosophy, especially Ishrāqism and philosophical Sufism. In these traditions, imagination is not a secondary substitute for intellect or perception but a primary way of knowing, directed toward real, mind-independent entities that stand between sensory particulars and abstract universals. Hadisi aims to reconstruct this theory of imagination for a contemporary audience, arguing that imagination should be understood as primarily concerned with its own proper objects, both in creative and exploratory contexts.
Joe Heath
In wealthy, democratic nations like Canada, the state is seen to play an important role in promoting justice, not just through the legal system, but through the goods and services that it provides in areas ranging from health to infrastructure. There is, however, a surprising level of disagreement over how, or in what way, these interventions are intended to promote greater economic justice. The most commonly held view is that these they are aimed at promoting greater equality among citizens in a market economy that produces a great deal of wealth, but distributes it quite unequally.
Joe Heath’s project, “A Normative Theory of the Welfare State,” intends to demonstrate that these public interventions are not aimed primarily at promoting equality, but rather at producing cooperative benefits for citizens by providing goods and services that would not be provided efficiently through markets. While this is often more beneficial to the poor, such egalitarianism is a secondary effect, which cannot provide the rationale for state intervention. In this respect, the major interventions of the welfare state are not interventions at all but rather are complementary to the operations of the market.
Peter King
Peter King’s main thesis is that one of the unfortunate accomplishments of the Middle Ages was to forge a single unified theory of inequality, based on the idea that social inequities reflect natural differences in intelligence. For example, women have less than men do, but are capable of cooperative action towards a shared goal, which is why men are the dominant partner in marriage or animals have no share of intelligence, since that is what makes human beings distinctive, and so they may be treated however one chooses. These types of views, clustered around intelligence and its differential possession, was supported by claims about the physiological composition of different people, and eventually extended to different types of people—which, when the distinctive Aristotelian underpinnings of the theory are finally discarded in the modern era, is then applied to what we now call racial and ethnic groups. Once we see that there were intellectual claims undergirding medieval inequalities, we can interrogate these claims to see where they went wrong, which will help us better understand the social inequities that still persist.
Andrew Lee
The Structure of Consciousness project by Andrew Lee examines some foundational questions about the structures of conscious experiences: the formal features of phenomenal character that can be captured through mathematical descriptions. The principal goal is to analyze a number of structural concepts—such as degrees, dimensions, parts, wholes, continuity, and discreteness—and to clarify how these concepts apply to conscious experiences. The project draws connections across analytic metaphysics, mathematics, and consciousness science.
Julia Nefsky and Sergio Tenenbaum
This project will offer a new understanding of the nature and significance of imperfect duties—moral obligations that involve considerable flexibility in how they are fulfilled. They argue that understanding these duties requires thinking about what is involved in pursuing aims over time or with other people. Most of our pursuits are carried out over time or collectively. By examining the nature of such pursuits, Julia Nefsky and Sergio Tenenbaum will uncover what they will argue is the fundamental distinction between perfect and imperfect duties and will show that it is essential to explaining much of our practical and moral lives.
Arthur Ripstein
Arthur Ripstein aims to provide a distinctively new juridical interpretation of the transcendental deduction offered by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant begins by identifying its topic:
Jurists, when they speak of entitlements and claims, distinguish in a legal matter between the questions about what is lawful (quid iuris) and that which concerns the fact (quid facti), and since they demand proof of both, they call the first, that which is to establish the entitlement or the legal claim, the deduction.
Many interpreters acknowledge Kant’s juridical vocabulary, but most treat it either as merely metaphorical or expository. Ripstein’s interpretation draws on Kant’s legal philosophy and his discussions of and objections to these “jurists.” The subject matter of the transcendental deduction and Kant’s deductions of private right is parallel: both concern themselves with the license to use principles that connects things—such as datable events—that are distinct from each other. Unsympathetic readers sometimes accuse Kant of improperly imposing the Critique on everything else that he writes. The juridical case provides him with an opportunity to redeploy juridical concepts as he understands them in their original home.
Marleen Rozemond
Is materialism true and there are only material beings, bodies, in the world, or are there also immaterial beings, such as human souls or minds? When we think of these questions, we tend to think of Descartes’s dualism, and the idea that human intelligence or consciousness requires an immaterial mind. During the early modern period (17th–18th centuries), matter was widely held to be passive and this gave rise to an “Activity Argument” for immaterial beings. Furthermore, the passivity of matter led many philosophers to conclude that immaterial entities are necessary not only to explain human mental lives, but also to explain many other, or even all, natural phenomena. This is an important but neglected episode in the perpetual debate about immaterial entities. Marleen Rozemond’s project aims to offer a correction to the widespread tendency to view questions about dualism and materialism through a Cartesian lens as revolving around the human mind with the intention to produce a book, tentatively titled Beyond Mechanistic Matter: Activity and Immateriality in Early Modern Philosophy.
Sonia Sedivy
Perception engages us with things around us so that we can act, learn, and know. Its important roles are the subject of much study and debate in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. But we don’t focus on the fact that we love to perceive; perceiving is a joy. We can perceive the beauty of our surroundings along with diverse other aesthetic properties. This is part of perception’s value in human life. Sonia Sedivy’s book project will highlight aesthetic experience; bring aesthetics together with psychological and neurological research on perceptual expertise; show how this can help explain that perception is a distinctive sensory, skillful form of understanding; and to use these results to elucidate perception’s value in our lives.