Fink and Shwayder Prizes
The Philosophy Department annually solicits submissions from its graduate students for the Fink and Shwayder Prizes. These are monetary awards for philosophical work of genuine distinction, and it is intended to acknowledge unusual accomplishment on the part of one of our students. The value of the Fink Prize is $1,000. The value of the Shwayder Prize depends on the payout of the endowment. The department reserves the right not to award the prizes in a year in which none of the essays submitted are judged to be sufficiently meritorious. Essays on any philosophical topic are eligible for the award.
Guidelines
The Fink and Shwayder Prizes are awarded in recognition of genuinely accomplished work on the part of our graduate students, work of the kind that goes considerably beyond the level necessary for successful completion of the course requirements in our graduate program.
Essays that are worthy of the prizes would really stand out if submitted in a graduate seminar; they are the kinds of essays that one might reasonably think of submitting for publication in a reputable journal of philosophical research. Sometimes a prize-winning paper might be identical with a paper that was actually submitted in a graduate seminar at Berkeley. But more typically, a paper that is worthy of the prize will start life as a good (A-level) seminar paper, and then be revised extensively, in light of comments from or discussion with the seminar instructor. It is presumably only rarely the case that a paper that was originally written for an upper-division undergraduate course would be a good candidate for the prizes. (In these respects, again, the standard of near-publishability might be a useful one to keep in mind.)
Graduate Students in the Group in Logic and Methodology of Science and in the Joint Program in Ancient Philosophy are welcome to submit for the Shwayder Prize
Submissions should not exceed thirty pages in length, and the author’s name should appear only on a detachable title page.
Shawyder Prize Winners
| Year | Winner | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Greyson Abid | The Irreducibility of Recognition |
Recent Fink Prize Winners
| Year | Winner | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Patrick Ryan | Szemerédi’s Theorem |
| 2020 | Sven Neth | Better Foundations for Subjective Probability |
| 2019 | Ravit Dotan | Machine learning, theory choice, and non-epistemic values |
| 2018 | Adam Bradley | The Paradox of Pain |
| 2017 | Antonia Peacocke | How do you know when you know yourself well? |
| 2016 | Peter Epstein | Shape Perception in a Relativistic Universe |
| 2015 | Jeff Kaplan | The Internal Point of View |
| 2014 | Alex Kerr | Perspective & Spatial Experience |
| 2013 | Ethan Jerzak | Non-Classical Knowledge |
| 2012 | Ethan Jerzak | Liars, Propositions, & Contexts |
| 2011 | Mike Caie | Doxastic Indeterminacy |
| 2010 | Andy Engen | The Reactive Sentiments & the Justification of Punishment |
| 2009 | James Stazicker | Attention, Visual Consciousness, & Indeterminacy |
| 2009 | George Tsai | Liberal Universalism & How We Understand the Past |
| 2008 | John Schwenkler | Space, Objects, and Object-Spaces: Rethinking a priority |
| 2007 | Markus Kohl | Substancehood & Subjecthood in Aristotle’s Categories |
| 2006 | Kristina Gehrman | Phronesis and Absorbed Coping: Is Practical Excellence in the Space of Reasons |
| 2006 | Berislav Marusic | Self-Knowledge Gambit |
| 2005 | Mike Titelbaum | When are Indexical Beliefs Relevant? |
| 2004 | No Winner | |
| 2003 | Suzanne Obdrzalek | Living in Doubt: Carneades’ Pithanon Reconsidered |
| 2002 | Peter Hanks | |
| 2001 | Elizabeth Camp | |
| 2001 | Eddie Cushman |
Founding language
“The William H. Fink Prize in Philosophy provides assistance to deserving graduate students with expressed majors in philosophy enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. The Prize was established to encourage top quality philosophical research and writing on the part of the philosophy graduate students.”
“The [Shwayder] Fund is an endowment which shall support an annual award for the student in any degree program at the University of California, Berkeley who writes the best essay in First Philosophy that year. Prospective recipients of the prize shall be chosen by the Chair of the Department of Philosophy, College of Letters and Science, or his or her designee, after consultation with the faculty members of the Department of Philosophy.”