The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada has posted a list of new Standard Research Grants for 2007. (Last year’s projects were discussed here.) This year’s stats: 88 applications (2006: 85, 2005: 96, 2004: 92), 26 grants, for a success rate of 29% (2006: 37%, 2005: 38%, 2004: 48%). This year, new scholars (≤ 5 years beyond PhD) had a success rate of only 22% (2006: 29%, 2005: 38%, 2004: 29%). Full stats here.
If someone knowledgeable about SSHRC funding policies, procedures, and politics reads this, I would be really interested to know why the success rate has been declining so sharply–it’s gotten almost twice as hard to get a project compared with 3 years ago! And contrary to what they said in their big SSHRC Transformation report they hdon’t seem to have increased funding to new researchers. But maybe just in philosophy?
An incomplete list of successful SRG proposals follows. I’ve included the total dollar figures over the 3-year duration of the grants (in CAD), but these shouldn’t be taken as an indication of the quality of the project. The funding rate depends on the requirements of the project (travel, research support) and on the amount of graduate student funding, not just on the ranking of the proposal. One may guess that the biggest awards (over $70,000) include Research Time Stipends, i.e., teaching relief, which is very hard to get. The grants aren’t broken down by specialty or department in the full (71-page) list, so I had to guess the philosophy projects from the titles and/or researchers. Please email me or comment if you notice an omission.
- Berryman, Sylvia A., The University of British Columbia. The philosophical reception of mechanics in ancient Greece. $41,000
- Dyzenhaus, David L., University of Toronto. The rule of law in the new normal. $24,398
- Demopoulos, William G., The University of Western Ontario. Methodological and metaphysical aspects of the applicability of mathematics. $83,375
- Ereshefsky, Marc F., University of Calgary. A Philosophical study of biological homology. $74,103
- Hellie, Benjamin, University of Toronto. The slightest philosophy. $38,350
- Larivée, Annie, Brock University. Vers une éthique du souci de soi : réappropriation contemporaine d’un concept philosophique ancien. $45,990
- Marion, Mathieu, Université du Québec à Montréal. Fondements philosophiques de la sémantique des jeux : rationalité et connaissance. $44,638
- Matthen, Mohan P., University of Toronto. How we see things. $101,300
- Morton, Adam, University of Alberta. Intellectual virtues of limitation-management $66,546
- Myrvold, Wayne C. and Harper, William L., The University of Western Ontario. Scientific inference: enriching the probabilistic framework. $54,608
- Nadeau, Robert, Université du Québec à Montréal. Économie et connaissance : sur l’épistémologie de Friedrich Hayek. $53,671
- Parsons, Glenn G., Ryerson University. A philosophical study of human beauty. $19,260
- Piché, Claude, Université de Montréal. Kant et Reinhold, la portée philosophique de deux conceptions divergentes des lumières. $49,700
- Piché, David, Université de Montréal. La théorie de la connaissance d’Hervé de Nédellec : édition critique de Quodlibeta, traduction et étude historico-philosophique. $71,924
- Schlimm, Dirk and Hallett, Michael, McGill University. Geometry and logic from Pasch to Hilbert. $54,280
- Weisberg, Jonathan J., University of Toronto. Synthesizing formal epistemologies. $33,825
- Wilson, Jessica M., University of Toronto. Hume’s Dictum and the causal connection. $31,400
- Yi, Byeong-Uk, University of Toronto. Plurals: their logic and semantics. $61,570
- Weinstein, Steven, University of Waterloo. Multiple time dimensions. $49,615
Two out of the five new Strategic Research Clusters are philosophy-related: “Clustering the humanist and social studies of science in Canada” includes Canadian philosophy/ers of science, and the “Canadian business ethics research network” is, well, applied ethics.
The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada also sometimes funds research projects by philosophers. This year there are (at least) two new 5-year discovery grants (with per-year figures) to people in philosophy departments:
- Pelletier, F. Jeffry, Simon Fraser University. Inference: Theories and computation. $34,000
- Zach, Richard, University of Calgary. Computational aspects of the epsilon calculus. $14,000