2021 Lebowitz Prize

The American Philosophical Association (APA) and Phi Beta Kappa are pleased to announce that Ned Block, Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, and Neural Science at New York University, and Ian Phillips, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, have won the 2021 Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution. Awarded annually by ΦBK in conjunction with APA, this prize recognizes outstanding achievement in the field of philosophy. Each winner receives an honorarium of $25,000. 

The Lebowitz Prize was established in 2012 by a generous bequest from Eve Lewellis Lebowitz in honor of her late husband, Martin R. Lebowitz, a distinguished philosophical critic. Lebowitz Prize winners must be two philosophers who hold contrasting views on a chosen topic of current interest in philosophy. They present their views and engage in a dialogue at an annual Lebowitz symposium, held during an APA divisional meeting.

Ned Block received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1971. Prior to joining the faculty at New York University in 1996, he was chair of the philosophy program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Block works in the philosophy of perception and foundations of neuroscience and cognitive science. He is currently writing a book on the perception/cognition border, The Border between Seeing and Thinking, and is co-editor of The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (MIT Press, 1997). 

Ian Phillips received his Ph.D. in philosophy from University College London. As the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, Phillips focuses on the intersection of philosophy and the mind and brain sciences. His areas of interest include the nature of perception; its relations to memory, imagination, and belief; the scientific study of consciousness; and the experience of time. He is the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience (Routledge, 2017). 

Professors Block and Phillips’s topic for the 2021 Lebowitz Prize is “Perception, Consciousness, and the Self.” The winners will present their work in January 2022 at the APA Central Division meeting in Chicago.

Nominations for the 2022 Lebowitz Prize will open in early fall 2021; the deadline is November 30, 2021. For more information visit pbk.org/Lebowitz.