Annette Baier Prize
This Prize is sponsored by Taylor and Francis, publisher of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy and the Australasian Philosophical Review.
2021 Winner
Jessica Whyte - University of New South Wales
‘Calculation and Conflict’. South Atlantic Quarterly, 119 (1):31-51.
“Calculation and Conflict” makes a ground-breaking contribution to the philosophy of political economy with its illuminating analysis of the calculation debate of the early twentieth century. The paper recounts the fateful moments when Otto Neurath’s arguments for planned economies oriented towards wellbeing and guided by popular deliberation lost the debate to Ludwig von Mises’s case for associating market freedoms with human freedoms, the progress of civilization, and the prospect of world peace. The paper’s incisive look at the original arguments from the period is of enormous relevance today for the understanding it provides of the reasoning behind neo-liberalism and how its rise involved the defeat or marginalization of some very persuasive alternatives.
2021 Shortlist
Melissa Merritt - University of New South Wales
‘Nature, corruption, and freedom: Stoic ethics in Kant's Religion’. European Journal of Philosophy, 29: 3-24.
Glenda Lucila Satne - University of Wollongong
‘Practical knowledge and shared agency: pluralizing the Anscombean view’. Inquiry.
Talia Morag - University of Wollongong
Comparison or Seeing-As? The Holocaust and Factory Farming." In Morality in a Realistic Spirit : Essays for Cora Diamond, Andrew Gleeson and Craig Taylor (eds.). London: Routledge.
If we attend to the singularity of seeing-as experiences, noticing how they make us feel and how they can isolate us, we may be able to talk about them in a way that invites others to share them or at least acknowledge our experience of them. This seeing-as is different than making a comparison; the latter uses concepts to make an argument, while the former is imagistic and expresses a singular experience. In this chapter, Talia Morag analyses J.M. Coetzee’s fictional character Elizabeth Costello’s profoundly isolating experience of seeing our treatment of non-human animals as connected to imagery of the Holocaust. The essay is a beautiful example of the insight philosophers can provide into crucial if painful aspects of the human experience when they extend their methods beyond conventional conceptual analysis.
2020 Commendations
Helen Ngo - Deakin University
‘Get Over It’? Racialised Temporalities and Bodily Orientations in Time'. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 40(2), 239-253
doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2019.1577231
Anne Schwenkenbecher - Murdoch University
'Collective moral obligations: "we-reasoning" and the perspective of the deliberating agent'. The Monist, 102(2): 151-171.
academic.oup.com/monist/article/102/2/151/5374570
2020 Shortlist
Laura Davy - Australian National University
'Between an Ethic of Care and an Ethic of Autonomy: Negotiating Relational Autonomy, Disability and Dependency'. Angelaki - Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 24, pp. 101 - 114
tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1620461
Holly Lawford-Smith - University of Melbourne
‘Democratic Authority to Geoengineer’. Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy.
tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13698230.2020.1694219
Hannah Tierney - Cornell University / University of Sydney
'Quality of reasons and degrees of moral responsibility'. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 97(4), 661-672
tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00048402.2018.1550795?journalCode=rajp20
2019 Winner
Louise Richardson-Self University of Tasmania
sites.google.com/site/louiserichardsonself
In "Offending White Men" the author very skillfully and convincingly draws on recent scholarship on epistemic injustice to address an important issue in contemporary Australian politics and society, namely recent challenges to the Racial Discrimination Act by white complainants. The paper is an excellent example of engaged philosophy - philosophy that takes as its starting point a specific social problem and uses the resources of philosophical theory to analyse and respond to that problem.
'Offending White Men: Racial Vilification, Misrecognition, and Epistemic Injustice'. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 4(4).
2019 Commendation
Holly Lawford-Smith University of Melbourne
'What's Wrong with Collective Punishment?', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 3/CXVIII.
2019 Shortlist
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Bronwyn Finnigan - Australian National University
sites.google.com/site/bronwynfinnigan
'Is Consciousness Reflexively Self-Aware? A Buddhist Analysis'. Ratio, 31: 389-401
Kristie Miller - The University of Sydney
'The New Growing Block Theory vs Presentism'. Inquiry, 61(3): 223-251.
Catherine Mills - Monash University
monash.edu/en/persons/catherine-mills
'Seeing, Feeling, Doing: Mandatory ultrasound laws, empathy and abortion'. Journal of Practical Ethics. 6(2): 1-31.
2018 Annette Baier Prize Winner
Jennifer Windt Monash University
Synthese 195.6 (2018): 2577-2625.
This paper is exceptionally clear and systematic. Building on an impressive body of prior work, Windt does a great job of walking the inexperienced reader through the steps of both established scholarly debates in analytic philosophy of mind, and a wealth of empirical data on dreaming. The manifold and subtle ways in which the paper manages to explore the testability of various well-known philosophical positions as empirical hypotheses greatly impressed the judges. The paper is also notable for arguing powerfully against a view of the relationship between mind, brain and body that is currently widely held by philosophers (‘cranial envatment’), and advancing an interesting positive thesis of its own: that the way we imagine our body to be shapes our phenomenal states, and thus while we’re dreaming our actual bodily sensations might give rise to dream images that unfold through their own logic and then inform further dream ‘perceptions’ in a rich feedback loop. One judge also noted potentially rich connections between this discussion and work by Lacan and Merleau-Ponty.
2018 Annette Baier Prize Commendations
Talia Morag Deakin University
"The Tracking Dogma in the Philosophy of Emotion"
Argumenta 2, 2 (2017) 343-363
Helen Ngo Deakin University
"Simulating the Lived Experience of Racism and Islamophobia: On ‘Embodied Empathy’ and Political Tourism"
Australian Feminist Law Journal (2017) 43:1, 107-123, DOI: 10.1080/13200968.2017.1321090
2018 Annette Baier Prize - Shortlist
This year, the judging panel had their work cut out for them with a record number of quality entries submitted for the Annette Baier Prize. A panel of judges, invited and appointed by the Committee for the Status of Women in the Philosophy Profession, read each entry in full. Each judge scored and ranked the entries based on; overall impression of merit, originality, scholarship and clarity of expression. Once ranked, a shortlist of five entries was established. The winner, selected from the shortlist will be announced and the prize awarded during the Presidential Address at the 2018 AAP NZAP Conference on Sunday July 8. The AAP and the Committee for the Status of Women in Philosophy would like to congratulate the shortlisted finalists as well as thank the other entrants, the judging panel and Taylor and Francis, the sponsors of the Annette Baier Prize.
Luara Ferracioli University of Sydney
"Citizenship for children: By soil, by blood, or by paternalism?"
Philos Stud (2017). doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0985-3
Bronwyn Finnigan Australian National University
"The Nature of a Buddhist Path"
A Mirror is for Reflection: Understanding Buddhist Ethics J.H.Davis (ed.) Oxford University Press, 2017, pp.33-52
2017 Annette Baier Prize Winner
Miriam Bankovsky La Trobe University
'Excusing Economic Envy: On Injustice and Impotence'
Journal of Applied Philosophy - March 2016
Bankovsky’s paper provides a highly original analysis of an idea that has been with us since the Ancient Greeks – that envy is irrational, and as such, does not provide justification for economic redistribution. Bankovsky challenges this orthodoxy by recovering the overlooked concept from John Rawls of ‘excusable envy’, which she argues shows that envy can be rational, and does provide grounds for economic redistribution. Bankovsky’s analysis is both detailed and ambitious; it has the potential to re-orient philosophical analysis of economic envy, from the language of individual shame to that of collective social justice. In this, she links conceptual argumentation with contemporary political concerns, in an article that the committee judged to be of a high standard of scholarship, clarity and overall merit. Her article is a commendable achievement.
2017 Short List
Tracy Llanera Macquarie University
'Rethinking nihilism: Rorty vs Taylor, Dreyfus and Kelly', Philosophy and Social Criticism, 42.9 (2016), 937-950.
Talia Morag Deakin University
'Emotions as judgments or as modes of “seeing-as”: The explanatory challenges toward a causal account for emotional episodes', Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason, London: Routledge, 2016, pp. 21-57
Dalia Nassar University of Sydney
'Analogical reflection as a source for the science of life: Kant and the possibility of the biological sciences', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 58 (2016), 57-66.
Anik Waldow University of Sydney
'Natural history and the formation of the human being: Kant on active forces', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 56 (2016), 67-76.
2016 Annette Baier Prize Winner
Monima Chadha Monash University
“Time-Series of Ephemeral Impressions: The Abhidharma-Buddhist View of Conscious Experience,” Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences: 14 (3), pp. 543–560.
This paper defends the Buddhist Abhidharma theory of experience from phenomenological and metaphysical challenges due to the doctrine of momentariness, the view that ‘seemingly rich conscious experiences are made fully available in a moment’. (544) It is a very thorough paper, responding to recent criticisms by Dan Zahavi and others, and elegantly weaving together history of philosophy in the Buddhist tradition, contemporary analytic philosophy, empirical neuroscience and the phenomenology of Husserl to craft an intricate united view. The piece is incredibly rich, and correspondingly complex, due to the worlds of knowledge navigated. It carefully treads the line between textual fidelity to particular traditions and conceptual engagement across traditions. The committee judged the paper to be of a high standard of scholarship, clarity, and overall merit, and found that one could keep reading this piece and finding more insights in it.
2016 Short List
Joanne Faulkner University of New South Wales
‘Our own Hurricane Katrina: Aboriginal disadvantage and Australian national identity’, National Identities, 2015, 17(2),117-135.
Bronwyn Finnigan Australian National University
‘Phronesis in Aristotle: Reconciling Deliberation with Spontaneity’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2015, Vol. XCI No. 3, 674-697.
Dalia Nassar University of Sydney
‘Analogy, Natural History and the Philosophy of Nature', Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2015, 9, 240-257.
Anik Waldow University of Sydney
‘Activating the Mind: Descartes’ Dreams and the Awakening of the Human Animal Machine’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2015, doi: 10.1111/phpr.12252