The American Philosophical Association is pleased to announce the winners of the 2017 Public Philosophy Op-Ed Contest:
- Katalin Balog, “‘Son of Saul,’ Kierkegaard and the Holocaust,” The Stone (The New York Times)
- Andrew Fiala, “Without Faith in Humanity, Cynicism Grows and Democracy Becomes Mob-Rule,” The Fresno Bee Newspaper
- David V. Johnson, “A Democracy Deficit Plagues the U.S. and the European Union,” Aeon
- Ian Olasov, “How Did ‘All Lives Matter’ Come to Oppose ‘Black Lives Matter’? A Philosopher of Language Weighs In,” Slate
- Michael Robillard and Bradley Strawser, “Are Soldiers Morally Exploited?” Ethical War Blog (Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace)
The APA committee on public philosophy sponsors this annual contest, which includes a $100 monetary award per essay, for the best opinion-editorials published by philosophers. The goal is to honor five standout pieces that successfully blend philosophical argumentation with an op-ed writing style.
Balog received her Ph.D. in 1998 from Rutgers University–New Brunswick. She has been teaching at Rutgers University–Newark since 2010. Her areas of specialization are philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology/cognitive science, free will and personal identity, metaphysics, and Buddhist philosophy.
Fiala has degrees from UCLA and Vanderbilt University. He is the author or editor of a dozen books. He has published more than 50 scholarly articles, and he has written hundreds of op-ed essays. Fiala is professor of philosophy and director of the Ethics Center at Fresno State. He writes a column on ethics and religion for the Fresno Bee. His scholarly research focuses on war and peace, politics, religion, and ethics.
Johnson is a writer and editor living in Berkeley, CA. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University.
Olasov is a graduate student in philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research interests are broad, but currently center on moral theory (moral non-cognitivism, the sociolinguistics of moral discourse) and the philosophy of language (speech act theory, pragmatics). He has taught at Brooklyn College, Medgar Evers College, and Kingsborough Community College.
Robillard received his undergraduate degree in art, philosophy, and literature in 2002 from the United States Military Academy. He then served as an officer in the U.S. Army for the next five years. After exiting the Army in 2007, he went on to receive his M.A. in philosophy from the University of Victoria in British Columbia. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Melbourne, Australia National University, and the University of Oxford. Robillard’s research focuses on various topics in the field of normative ethics to include exploitation and its relation to present-day military recruitment as well as war and its relation to future generations. Robillard is an Iraq war veteran and former Army Airborne Ranger.
Strawser is associate professor of philosophy in the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He is also a research associate at Oxford University’s Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict (ELAC) in Oxford, UK. Strawser works in ethics, broadly construed, both normative and applied, and he has areas of competence in political philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion (both Western and non-Western). Outside of his AOS and AOCs, Strawser has enduring research interests in Kant, action theory, logic, the philosophy of sport, and ancient philosophy, as well as a variety of particular applied ethics sub-fields, including the ethics of war and peace, military ethics, bioethics, and development ethics.
Learn more about this contest by visiting the Public Philosophy Op-Ed Contest page.
