2009 Canadian Research Grants to Philosophers

SSHRC has posted the list of funded projects from the most recent Standard Research Grants competition. These grants are for three years. Last year’s results are here. (Check the discussion in comments for info on what these grants are for, comparison with NEH grants, etc. UPDATE: Actually, the interesting discussion followed the 2006 list.)

This year’s stats: 105 applications (2008: 92; 2007: 88; 2006: 85, 2005: 96, 2004: 92), 32 grants, for a success rate of 30% (2008: 30%; 2007: 29%; 2006: 37%, 2005: 38%, 2004: 48%). Full stats here.

Here’s a list of the projects that jumped out at me as being philosophy projects or where I recognized the applicants as philosophers. So, the list is certainly incomplete! I haven’t bothered sorting them alphabetically this time: they’re sorted by province, east to west, then by university. The list doesn’t give the department, nor does it give the grant selection committee, so some of these may have applied to a GSC other than philosophy–I don’t think there’s a way to tell. As always, please email with corrections and additions, or post in comments. Congratulations to all! And kudos to SSHRC for making the list of results available right away, and not with a delay of several months as in the past.

And a question: is it just my impression, or is Quebec overrepresented in philosophy SSHRC’s? 42% of my list from Quebec, but only 27% of overall applications. It wasn’t like this in the past few years. Maybe just coincidence? (After all, the prairies got nothing this year, it seems, but we had a pretty good showing last year.)

  1. Renaud, François – Université de Moncton $25,787
    Cicéron platonicien : la forme du dialogue et le débat entre scepticisme et dogmatisme
  2. Charles, Syliane – Bishop’s University $44,400
    Entre physique et métaphysique, l’individu chez Spinoza
  3. Danisch, Robert C. – Concordia University $59,000
    Completing the linguistic turn: neopragmatism as rhetorical theory
  4. Smith, Justin E.H. – Concordia University $76,874
    Nature, human nature, and human difference: philosophical anthropology and the problem of diversity in the new science of nature, 1500-1800
  5. Al-Saji, Alia – McGill University $39,957
    Vision, race and ethics: a phenomenological investigation of racializing perception
  6. Davies, David A. – McGill University $38,625
    The ontology of multiple artworks: a performance-theoretic approach
  7. Deslauriers, Marguerite L. – McGill University $80,237
    Women, rationality and immortality: the reception of Plato and Aristotle in 16th and 17th C. feminist philosophy
  8. McGilvray, James A. – McGill University $52,802
    Philosophy and biolinguistics
  9. Duchesneau, François – Université de Montréal $49,500
    Monades et systèmes de la nature : Leibniz et sa postérité
  10. Lepage, François – Université de Montréal $45,000
    Les systèmes logiques de Lesniewski : une perspective contemporaine
  11. Macdonald, Iain – Université de Montréal $35,724
    Adorno and Heidegger: history and stakes of an unfinished debate
  12. Lacroix, André – Université de Sherbrooke $71,660
    Bégin, Luc – Université Laval
    La formation chez les praticiens en éthique
  13. Fisette, Denis – Université du Québec à Montréal $91,270
    La philosophie de Franz Brentano via sa correspondance avec ses étudiants
  14. Panaccio, Claude – Université du Québec à Montréal $71,540
    Le nominalisme médiéval et l’externalisme : ontologie et théorie de l’esprit
  15. Daigle, Christine – Brock University $42,873
    Nietzsche as phenomenologist
  16. Griffin, Nicholas J. – McMaster University $164,297
    The collected letters of Bertrand Russell
  17. Kumar, Rahul – Queen’s University $51,300
    Contractualism and the contours of morality
  18. Russon, John E. – University of Guelph $27,445
    Being through another: the idealist legacy in continental philosophy
  19. Moggach, Douglas A. – University of Ottawa $53,832
    Freedom and perfection: Kant’s metaphysics of morals in context
  20. Thompson, Evan T. – University of Toronto $41,640
    The self and the brain: a neurophenomenological approach
  21. Ripstein, Arthur S. – University of Toronto $71,050
    Tort law as philosophy
  22. Whiting, Jennifer E. – University of Toronto $58,000
    Personal identity: practical yet metaphysical; or the ancient origins of Locke’s account – and of any truly neo-Lockean account – of personal identity
  23. Morrison, Margaret C. – University of Toronto $73,250
    Computer simulation, modelling and experiment: knowledge at the boundaries
  24. Mullin, Amy M. – University of Toronto $39,723
    Children and parents: ethical relationships
  25. Franks, Paul W. – University of Toronto $75,852
    What is the human: Kantianism the development of the humanities and the threat of Nihilism
  26. Nagel, Jennifer – University of Toronto $38,220
    Metacognition and epistemic assessment
  27. DeVidi, David M. – University of Waterloo $73,350
    Pluralisms, mathematical and logical
  28. Boran, Idil – York University $36,155
    The idea of a market for carbon and its implications for philosophy and public policy
  29. Shapiro, Lisa C. – Simon Fraser University $45,900
    Emotions and sense perception in 17th and 18th century philosophy
  30. Margolis, Eric – The University of British Columbia $64,250
    The origins of human concepts
  31. Aydede, Murat – The University of British Columbia $45,750
    Pain and the nature of phenomenal consciousness
  32. Woodcock, Scott – University of Victoria $46,108
    Practical wisdom and naturalistic moral psychology

14 thoughts on “2009 Canadian Research Grants to Philosophers

  1. There’s at least one more:Mullin, Amy M. – University of Toronto $39,723Children and parents: ethical relationships

  2. Added, thanks. Brings the number of grants to women up to 6 (20%), after a number of years where it was much less than that. It’s still significantly less than for all SSHRC disciplines, where it’s about 36% (at almost equal numbers of applications: 46% women applicants).

  3. Lisa Shapiro (ie, me) at Simon Fraser received a SSHRC this round, in the amount of $45,900 for a project titled “Emotions and Sense Perception in 17th and 18th century Philosophy”

  4. Another one: Boran, Idil – York University $36,155The idea of a market for carbon and its implications for philosophy and public policy

  5. Another one: Marguerite Deslauriers (McGill) Women, rationality and immortality: the reception of Plato and Aristotle in 16th and 17th C. feminist philosophy $80,237

  6. Thanks. That’s 28% women now. And it’s frightneing that the only people I overlooked are women. I swear, I scanned the titles, not the names!

  7. What a scam! What will this money go for air tickets, bogus research with no application/use other than self-indulgence? One more project on Nietzsche or Leibniz? The hundreds and hundreds of books and thousands of articles published are clearly not enough! How do you people sleep at night, knowing that there are hungry kids who desperately need tax dollars to feed them which instead are feeding your pseudo-research?

  8. Once the results are in the awards search engine, you can search by committee as well as program. So you could update your lists at that point. You can also search several years.In the awards search engine you can also search for those that listed philosophy as a discipline regardless of the committee they applied to.The link is at the top of the “competition results” page under Winning Research.

  9. BTW, SSHRC doesn’t decide when to release the results publicly. Industry Canada does. (That’s the department SSHRC reports to.) Announcements are sensitive political things and the politicians get to decide.

  10. Yes, I could. Probably a year and a half from now, people won’t care anymore. And that’s how long it’ll be before the results of this year’s competition are in the search engine.

  11. I’m kinda surprised by a couple, particularly – since we’re on the topic of Quebec – one particular Quebec school being represented by some of their weaker faculty.That being said, Anonymous of April 22 doesn’t seem to realize that plenty of the “hungry kids who desperately need tax dollars” are philosophy grad students who will ultimately get a good chunk of this money.

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