The American Philosophical Association is pleased to announce that Dr. Ronald Mallon (Washington University in St. Louis) has been awarded the 2017 Joseph B. Gittler Award for his book, The Construction of Human Kinds.
The annual Joseph B. Gittler Award, which includes a $4,000 monetary prize, is given for an outstanding scholarly contribution in the field of the philosophy of one or more of the social sciences. For more information on this award, visit the Joseph B. Gittler Award page.
Mallon is chair of the philosophy department and the director of the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis. His research and teaching areas are in mind, cognitive science, experimental philosophy, philosophy of science & social science, social & political theory, and ethics. Mallon received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Rutgers University.
The chair of the selection committee stated, “This book is an important contribution to perhaps the most influential tradition in the social sciences and the philosophy thereof: social constructionism. Mallon’s discussion of the distinction between natural and social kinds, and the way in which this distinction interacts, or fails to interact, with the realism/antirealism debate, makes a first-rate contribution to our understanding of the nature of the social sciences. It is original, insightful, and philosophically sophisticated, and will make an outstanding and lasting contribution to this field.”
