WINNER OF THE HERZ PRIZE

This year's winner is Mohammad Reza Karim Hadisi, for his paper “Kant's Transcendental Arguments, Hegel's Dialectical Method and Pyrrhonism.” Reza has just started his Ph.D at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He wrote the paper when he was a MA student at Concordia University in Montréal. Prior to that, he studied Philosophy at the University of Sheffield and Computer Science at the University of Science, Malaysia.

Reza's paper was presented at the 2012 meeting of the Eastern Study Group, which was held at Princeton University in April 2012. The paper criticizes some common readings of the structure and the goal of transcendental arguments, and proposes an alternative interpretation that places Kant’s arguments in direct relation to the Pyrrhonian challenge. Reza connects this reading of transcendental arguments to Hegel's criticism of Kant's method. He argues that the “dialectal method” is to be understood as Hegel's proposal for making transcendental argumentation stronger against the Pyrrhonian challenge. He concludes that the dispute between Kantian and Hegelian methodologies can be explained through their different understanding of the scope and meaning of Pyrrhonism.

Reza’s paper is available in the member’s only section of our website.