The American Philosophical Association (APA) and the Phi Beta Kappa Society (PBK) are pleased to announce that Dr. Ned Block, Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, and Neural Science at New York University, and Dr. Ian Phillips, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, have won the 2021 Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution. Awarded annually by PBK in conjunction with the APA, this prize recognizes outstanding achievement in the field of philosophy. Each winner will be awarded an honorarium.
The Lebowitz Prize was established in 2012 by a generous bequest from Eve Lewellis Lebowitz in honor of her late husband, Martin R. Lebowitz, a distinguished philosophical critic. Lebowitz Prize winners must be two philosophers who hold contrasting views on a chosen topic of current interest in philosophy. They present their views and engage in a dialogue at an annual Lebowitz symposium, held during an APA divisional meeting.
Ned Block, Ph.D., received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1971. Prior to joining the faculty at New York University in 1996, he was chair of the philosophy program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Block works in philosophy of perception and foundations of neuroscience and cognitive science. He is currently writing a book on the perception/cognition border, The Border between Seeing and Thinking, and is co-editor of The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (MIT Press, 1997). Dr. Block is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Science Foundation, as well as the Robert A. Muh Alumni Award in Humanities and Social Science from MIT and the Jean Nicod Prize.
Ian Phillips, Ph.D., received his undergraduate degree from Magdalen College, Oxford, his MA in Physics & Philosophy and BPhil in Philosophy from Magdalen College, Oxford, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from University College, London. As Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, his work lies at the intersection of philosophy and the mind and brain sciences. His areas of interest include the nature of perception; its relations to memory, imagination, and belief; the scientific study of consciousness; and our experience of time. He is the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience (Routledge, 2017) and numerous academic articles. Dr. Phillips is the recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize, among many other awards and grants.
Professors Block and Phillips’s topic for the 2021 Lebowitz Prize is “Perception, Consciousness and the Self.” The winners will present their work in February 2022 at the APA Central Division meeting in Chicago, IL.
Nominations/applications for the 2022 Lebowitz Prize will open in early fall 2021; the deadline is November 30, 2021. Please click here for more information.
