The Shpilman Institute of Photography launched its inaugural research awards this year with a special call for projects in the “Philosophy and Photography.” Diarmuid Costello has been awarded one of six awards in this category, drawn from 500 applications from 47 countries.

Professor Dominic McIver Lopes, Distinguished University Scholar and Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship to spend January-June 2012 at Warwick.

Six students from the Philosophy department have won 2011 Warwick Advantage Awards, with two of them winning Gold Awards. The awards recognize students who have been able to demonstrate commitment to, and learning from, their extra-curricular activities, and are able to present their learning from these experiences in a compelling way, including to potential employers. Congratulations to this year’s winners!

We are pleased to announce that Professor Quassim Cassam has been awarded the highly prestigious Mind Senior Research Fellowship in Philosophy for the Academic year 2012-13.

These fellowships (for which only one is awarded per year) are intended for senior academics with a proven track record of high quality research in any area of Philosophy to release them from administrative and teaching duties in order to pursue a period of sustained research. The fellowships are awarded in recognition of the distinction of the applicant's work, and above all of the exceptional interest and importance of the project proposed. Professor Cassam will spend the fellowship period writing a book on self-knowledge and irrationality, building on the ideas contained in his 2011 Aristotelian Society Presidential Address 'Knowing What You Believe'.

We are pleased to announce that Professor Stephen Houlgate has been awarded one of the highly prestigious three year Leverhulme Trust Major Fellowships to pursue his work on Hegel’s Science of Logic. The fellowships enable well-established and distinguished researchers in the disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences to devote themselves to a single research project of outstanding originality and significance.

Professor Houlgate’s project is to write an accessible and original study of the Science of Logic (1812-16, 1832), which is one of the most important, but also most difficult and complex (and most neglected) texts in the history of Western philosophy. Professor Houlgate’s book, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic (2006), concentrated on the first part of the Logic: the “doctrine of being”. The focus of his Leverhulme project will be on the second and third parts of the Logic: the “doctrine of essence” and the “doctrine of the concept”. The doctrine of essence is where Hegel carries out his revolutionary critique of pre-Kantian metaphysics and Kantian “reflection”, and the doctrine of the concept is where he sets out the core of his own alternative, “speculative-dialectical” metaphysics (which itself builds on the thought of Aristotle).

Professor Houlgate’s project will involve not only clarifying Hegel’s often tortuous arguments, but also bringing out their philosophical significance by comparing Hegel’s understanding of specific concepts (such as identity, difference, form, substance, cause) with those of Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant and Deleuze. Professor Houlgate’s study of the Logic will be published by Oxford University Press.