Announcements

Submit your entry now: Williams Prize for Philosophy 2025-26

We're happy to announce that applications are now being accepted for the Williams Prize for Philosophy!

The deadline for submissions is March 31, 2026.

The awards for the best papers in Philosophy are:

• $1,000 for 1st place
• $800 for 2nd place
• $700 for 3rd place
• $500 for best First Year paper (it can added to any of the above)

2025-2026 Williams Prize

Established in 1908 by Edward H. Williams, professor of geology and mechanical engineering, the Williams Prizes recognize outstanding work in writing and performance. To be eligible for the prizes, all work submitted must have been completed in a Lehigh course or internship and written after the date of April 1, 2025 with direct or indirect supervision by Lehigh instructors.

Considerations:
In your file upload, ensure your personal information is removed from the file. This includes your name, class name, faculty member who assigned project, etc. Submissions will be rejected if identifying information is not removed. 

• Only material written by you for a Lehigh course may be submitted.
• Only essays completed after April 1, 2025 are eligible.
• Presidential Scholars are not eligible.
• Limit: two entries per category.
• Essays generated using ChatGPT and other forms of generative artificial intelligence are not eligible
• No entry may be submitted more than once.
• Submissions are due by March 31, 2026

Submit here 

Information regarding other competition categories, etc, can be found here

We are happy to announce David Chalmers of New York University as the Selfridge Lecturer for 2026.

David Chalmers is University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University. He is the author of The Conscious Mind (1996), Constructing The World (2010), and Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (2022). He cofounded the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and the PhilPapers Foundation. He is known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness and for the idea of the extended mind.

Prof. Chalmers will deliver the Selfridge Lecture on "What We Talk T When We Talk To Language Models"  on Tuesday, February 3 at 4:30pm in HST Forum 101. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Prof. Chalmers will then give a College Talk on "Sentience and Moral Status" on Wednesday, February 4 at 4:30pm in the Scheler Humanities Forum (Linderman 200).

The Department of Philosophy invites applications for one (1) Open Rank position with an area of specialization in Political Philosophy and areas of competence in Philosophy of Law or Ethics. The anticipated start date will be July 1st, 2026.

Learn more about the position and apply:

for Tenure-track Assistant Professor: apply.interfolio.com/173789

for Tenured Associate/Full Professor: apply.interfolio.com/173890

We are excited to announce Professor Peter Adamson, a leading Historian of Philosophy and a principal scholar of Islamic Philosophy, as the Selfridge Lecturer for 2025.

Peter Adamson is Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He is the author of Al-Kindī and Al-Razī in the series “Great Medieval Thinkers” from Oxford University Press, and has edited or co-edited numerous books, including The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy and Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays. He is also the host of the History of Philosophy podcast (www.historyofphilosophy.net), which appears as a series of books with Oxford University Press.

On Wednesday, March 26th at 4:30pm in the HST Forum 101, Professor Adamson will deliver the Selfridge Lecture  entitled "Skepticism Across Borders: Arguments from Animal Difference in Chinese, Greek, and Arabic Philosophy". The lecture will focus on a skeptical argument stating that animals have a different perspective on the world from humans. Since there is no reason to prefer the human perspective on the world to animal perspectives, one should suspend judgment about the veracity of the human perspective. Obviously this argument needs a lot of filling out before it can be evaluated. To undertake this task, the lecture begins from a resonant passage in the Taoist classic, the Zhuangzi, before examining in more detail the skeptical mode from animals in Sextus Empiricus and similar material in Montaigne. The talk then turns to an epistle from the Islamic “Brethren of Purity,” who imagined animals bringing a court case against humans.

Professor Adamson will also give a College Talk on Thursday, March 27 at 4:30pm in the Scheler Humanities Forum (LI-200) on "Avicennan Scholasticism: Post-Classical Philosophy in the Islamic East". According to a long-standing, but now widely discredited, narrative about philosophy in the Islamic world, it more or less ends with the commentaries of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in the 12th century. In fact, philosophy continued to be pursued with great sophistication for centuries thereafter. But there was indeed a difference: whereas early philosophical discussions mostly centered around Aristotle, as of the 12th century the focus moves to the ideas of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), who displaced him as the definitive figure who all serious intellectuals needed to confront. In this presentation Prof. Adamson will compare this development to the scholastic tradition in medieval Latin philosophy, suggesting that there are striking parallels: these range from the way that texts were written to the specific topics that received attention. In some cases we even see the same arguments being devised independently of one another in Latin and Arabic, simply because in both traditions it was so important to respond to Ibn Sina.

Philosophy's jury, consisting of Professors Mark Bickhard and Chad Kautzer, announced yesterday the winning papers after blind-reading all 30 entries we received!

The names of the deserving winners are:

1st prize: Xavier Piccone '24 for his paper "Meaning and Method in the Later Wittgenstein"

2nd prize: Xavier Piccone '24 for his paper "Ethical Aspects; A Responsse to Marcuse"

3rd prize: Julia Aloi '24 for her paper "Wittgenstein's Poetics"

Best FirstYear paper prize:  Thomas Kaspereen '27 for his paper "Surreal Enstrangement"

Congratulations to all, we're very proud of you! Woohoo!

Tuesday, April 16 at 4:30pm.

Virtual event: Please REGISTER to receive zoom information -OR- come and watch with us in EWFM 625.

You can access the talk's Handout here.

Abstract: In this talk, Prof. Standish will first examine Stanley Cavell’s essays on music – in particular his “Music Discomposed”, which is concerned with the “new” music influenced by Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils. Cavell’s discussion is less a reflection on the qualities of this music than a philosophical questioning of the implications of attitudes towards it, especially regarding the exercise of judgement in criticism, composition, and performance. In the course of this he provides an account of what he calls “knowing by feeling” (sometimes “in feeling”). Touching on connections with his later occasional pieces on music, published in Here and Now (2023), and exploring some late remarks by Wittgenstein on the philosophy of psychology, Standish shall, in the second part, examine the wider ramifications of the idea of “meaning it” that emerges. In particular, he considers connections between this conception of meaning and the development of AI. 

Paul Standish is Professor and Head of the Centre for Philosophy of Education at UCL IOE. He has extensive teaching experience in schools, colleges and universities, and his research reflects that range. He is the author or editor of some twenty books, with a sustained interest in Wittgenstein extending from his Beyond the Self: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Limits of Language (1992, Ashgate) to Wittgenstein and Education: On not sparing others the trouble of thinking (2023, Wiley), co-edited with Adrian Skilbeck. Aside from authoring many essays on Stanley Cavell, he is co-editor with Naoko Saito of two books - Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups (2012, Fordham UP) and Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation: The Truth is Translated (2017, Rowman & Littlefield) – as well as a forthcoming special issue entitled Walden in Tokyo: Stanley Cavell and the Thought of Other Cultures (Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2024). He is President of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain.

Congratulations to Professor Filippo Casati for being chosen among a very strong pool of nominees to receive the 2024 CAS Dean's Faculty Award in the domain of Research, Scholaship, and Creative Activity!

This award follows the Stabler Award for Excellence in Teaching, as well as the Paul J. Franz, Jr. Fellowship for Research Award that Prof. Casati received in 2022.

We are fortunate to have such an inspiring scholar educating our students. Well deserved, Filippo!

Tuesday, April 2 at 4:30pm (Scheler Humanities Forum - LI 200)

In July 1656, Bento (Baruch) de Spinoza was given the harshest herem (ban or ostracism) ever issued by the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community. The text of the ban rains curses down upon the young man, for his “abominable heresies and monstrous deeds”. Unlike other bans issued by the community in the period, it was never rescinded. But why was Spinoza excommunicated with such prejudice? He was only twenty-three years old, not yet the famous (and “scandalous”) philosopher he would later become. In this lecture, we will consider the circumstances of the ban and use them as a way of examining some of the major themes of Spinoza’s philosophy.

Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is currently director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities. His books include Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die (Princeton, 2020); Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (Yale, “Jewish Lives” series, 2018); A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton, 2011); The Philosopher, the Priest and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes (Princeton, 2013), Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999 [2^nd ed. 2016], winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award for Biography), and Rembrandt's Jews (Chicago, 2003, which was named a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction). His most recent books are The Portraitist: Frans Hals and His World (Chicago, 2022) and Descartes: The Renewal of Philosophy (Reaktion Books, 2023). He has also published, with his son Ben Nadler, the graphic book Heretics! The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy (Princeton, 2017). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

We're happy to announce that applications are now being accepted for the Williams Prize for Philosophy.

The awards are:

• $1,000 for 1st place
• $800 for 2nd place
• $600 for 3rd place
• $200 for best First Year paper (it can added to the above)

Rules and procedure information can be found here