Department News

Jeffrey Kaplan wins Townsend Fellowship

Congratulations to Jeffrey Kaplan on winning a Townsend Dissertation Fellowship. The competition for these fellowships, which fund a year of dissertation work, is open to all graduate students at Berkeley with dissertation projects in the humanities. Jeff will be the 2017-2018 Irving and Jean Stone Fellow. His project concerns what he sees as the central problem in philosophy of law for the last century: how can human-made law have authority? Rather than offer a straightforward solution, he argues that the problem results from an ambiguity in the notion of authority. Resolving the ambiguity, he argues, has broad implications for similar problems in the study of language and other social practices, such as games and etiquette.

April 28, 2017