The American Philosophical Association is pleased to announce that Professor Kristopher McDaniel (Syracuse University) has been awarded the 2018 Sanders Book Prize for his book, The Fragmentation of Being (Oxford University Press).
The selection committee has also awarded honorable mention to Professor Donald Ainslie (University of Toronto) for his book, Hume’s True Scepticism (Oxford University Press).
The annual Sanders Book Prize, in the amount of $7,000, is awarded to the best book in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, or epistemology that engages the analytic tradition published in English in the previous five-year period. This prize is funded through the generosity of the Marc Sanders Foundation.
Dr. Holly Andersen (Simon Fraser University), chair of the selection committee, said, “In The Fragmentation of Being, McDaniel offers a challenge to a basic assumption that structures all mainstream metaphysics. The book displays a creative and thorough integration of argumentative resources from an impressive breadth of sources, in support of a thesis with far-reaching implications.”
Andersen added, “Honorable Mention goes to Hume’s True Scepticism by Donald Ainslie. This book also stood out for its breadth, scope, and implications, and for the excellent writing style. Philosophers across subdisciplines will find this metaphilosophy in a historical mode worthwhile.”
Kris McDaniel is associate professor in the department of philosophy at Syracuse University. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2004. Professor McDaniel’s area of specialization is metaphysics, and areas of competence are ethics, history of philosophy (primarily Kant, early modern, Heidegger, and early 20th century), and philosophy of religion. He has published articles on existence, meta-ontology, composition, persistence through time, and modality. Professor McDaniel has another book, This Is Metaphysics, under contract with Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.
Is it too much to request a discussion of the book? Well, I suppose so. Anyway, I found the title alone to be engaging, and learning about someone writing from where I was born helped set the hook.
The title, The Fragmentation of Being, brought these thoughts immediately to mind…
I’m fascinated by the way the divisive nature of thought fragments our own internal being. As example, consider the phrase “I am thinking XYZ”. There is “me” the thinker, and then there is “XYZ” the thought, experienced as two different things, even though they are actually one.
As to the larger world beyond our minds, it seems to me that nothing exists in the sense of being a separate thing. To my mind, the whole concept of “thing” is an illusion created by the divisive nature of thought, the way it operates by dividing a single unified reality in to conceptual parts. It seems that we understandably become confused and consider the conceptual parts, the “things”, to be real, when in truth they are merely conceptual.
Anyway, if the good fellow won a prize perhaps his book merits discussion. If not here, then perhaps someone knows where.