The American Philosophical Association (APA) and the Phi Beta Kappa Society (ΦBK) are pleased to announce that Dr. Felipe De Brigard, Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, and Dr. Sarah Robins, Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University, have won the 2026 Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution. Awarded annually by ΦBK in conjunction with the APA, this prize recognizes outstanding achievement in the field of philosophy.
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.
Felipe De Brigard is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology & Neuroscience and a member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University. He is also Principal Investigator of the Imagination and Modal Cognition Laboratory (IMC Lab) at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. He earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy and neuropsychology from the National University of Colombia, followed by a MA in philosophy and cognitive science from Tufts University and a Ph.D. in philosophy, with a concentration in cognitive neuroscience, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before joining Duke, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Lab and the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. De Brigard is the author of several books, including Neuroscience and Philosophy (MIT Press) and Memory and Remembering (Cambridge University Press), and has published more than 130 articles across philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. His research focuses on the nature of memory and its relationships with perception, imagination, attention, and consciousness, as well as the foundations of neuroscience and moral psychology. He is co-director of the Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy (SSNAP) and has directed Duke’s Memory and Forgiveness project since 2021.
Sarah Robins is a Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. She is also founding co-director of Purdue’s Cognition, Agency, and Intelligence Center (CAIC) and past President of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SSPP). Her academic interests have long been at the intersection of philosophy and the mind sciences. She holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and psychology from Hendrix College and earned her Ph.D. from the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on memory, through which she discusses a range of issues in philosophy of mind, psychology, and neuroscience. Much of her recent work centers on the concept of the memory trace, or engram, and the role it plays in both everyday and scientific thinking about remembering. In addition to her own writing, she created and edits The Memory Palace, a public-facing Substack that functions as a group blog for philosophers of memory, with posts available in four languages.
Professors De Brigard and Robins’ topic for the 2026 Lebowitz Prize is “The Distinctiveness of Memory.” They will present their work in March 2027 at the APA Pacific Division meeting in Portland, Oregon.
Nominations/applications for the 2027 Lebowitz Prize will open in early fall 2026; the deadline is November 30, 2026.
