The American Philosophical Association is pleased to announce that Dr. Federica Berdini has been awarded the 2018 Journal of Value Inquiry Prize for her paper, “Agency’s Constitutive Normativity: An Elucidation.”
This annual prize, which includes a $500 monetary award, recognizes the best unpublished article-length work in philosophy by a non-academically affiliated philosopher. The winner’s work may be published in the Journal of Value Inquiry by mutual agreement of the author and the editors of the journal.
Dominic McIver Lopes (University of British Columbia), who was the chair of the selection committee, had this to say: “A fine example of the ‘social turn’ across a great deal of recent philosophy, this paper argues that attempts to ground practical normativity in self-constituting agency should conceive of agency as socially embedded. Drawing on psychological research on personality disorders, Federica Berdini first shows how agency is constituted in part through networks of social and interpersonal relationships, and then leverages this result to develop and deepen Christine Korsgaard’s account of agency’s constitutive normativity. The paper is a model of how to blend deft philosophical reasoning with sensitive attention to empirical reality.”
Dr. Berdini received her PhD from the University of Bologna’s Science, Cognition, and Technology program. Her research is in philosophy of action and philosophy of psychology, and her areas of specialization are ethics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.
