The
judges for the 2015 Wilfrid Sellars Essay Prize are pleased to announce that
the winner for this year’s competition is
Mavis Biss, author of “Kantian Moral Striving.”
Mavis
Biss completed her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011 and is
Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. She
specializes in moral philosophy, with particular focus on Kantian ethics and
conceptions of moral imagination. Her recent publications include: “Radical Moral Imagination: Courage, Hope and
Articulation,” Hypatia (2013), “Moral
Imagination, Perception and Judgment,” The
Southern Journal of Philosophy (2014), and “Empathy and Interrogation,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy (2014). Her current work
deals with the ideal of moral self-perfection in Kant’s ethics and the
complexities of rational agency in the face of contested moral meaning.
Abstract
for “Kant’s Moral Striving:”
The paper focuses on a
single question that highlights some of the most puzzling aspects of Kant’s
explanation of the duty of moral self-perfection. What kinds of activity count
as striving for purity in one’s disposition to duty or strength of will? I
argue that a dominant strand of Kant’s approach to moral striving does not fit
familiar models of striving. I seek to address this problem in a way that
avoids the flaws of synchronic and atomistic approaches to moral
self-discipline by developing an account of Kantian moral striving as an
ongoing contemplative activity complexly engaged with multiple forms of
self-knowledge.
The judges for the 2015
Wilfrid Sellars Essay Prize also gave an honorable mention to Reed Winegar for
his “Kant's Criticisms of Hume's Dialogues concerning
Natural Religion.”
Reed Winegar is an assistant professor of philosophy at Fordham
University. He received his BA from Harvard in 2005 and his PhD from the
University of Pennsylvania in 2012. In 2015/16 he will be a VolkwagenStiftung/ Mellon
Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Freie Universität in Berlin. His
essay "Kant's Criticisms of Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural
Religion" is forthcoming in the British Journal for the History of
Philosophy. Other published work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in the Archiv
für Geschichte der Philosophie, Hegel Bulletin, and Journal of
Scottish Philosophy. His current research focuses on Kant's criticisms of
metaphysics and on issues in Kant's 3rd Critique.
Abstract for “Kant’s Criticisms of Hume’s Diaglogues concerning Natural Religion:”
According to recent commentators, Kant agrees with Hume's Dialogues
concerning Natural Religion (1) that physico-theology can never
provide knowledge of God and (2) that the concept of God, nevertheless,
provides a useful heuristic principle for scientific enquiry. This paper argues
that Kant, far from agreeing with Hume, criticizes Hume's Dialogues for
failing to prove that physico-theology can never yield knowledge of God and
that Kant correctly views Hume's Dialogues as a threat to, rather than
an anticipation of, his own view that the concept of God provides a useful
heuristic principle for science. The paper concludes that Kant's critique of
physico-theology reflects Kant's deep dissatisfaction with Hume's manner of
argumentation and suggests that Kant's attempt to provide a more successful
critique of physico-theology merits continued philosophical attention.
Both
essays can be found in the members-only section of our website under “Sellars
Prize”.
