2023 Lebowitz Prize Awarded to Philosophers Kristie Dotson and Susanna Siegel

WASHINGTON, DC –

The American Philosophical Association (APA) and the Phi Beta Kappa Society (ΦBK) are pleased to announce that Dr. Kristie Dotson, University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor at University of Michigan, and Dr. Susanna Siegel, Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, have won the 2023 Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution. Awarded annually by ΦBK in conjunction with the APA, this prize recognizes outstanding achievement in the field of philosophy. Each winner will be awarded 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.

Dr. Kristie Dotson is a University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Philosophy and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. She specializes in epistemology, metaphilosophy, and Black feminist philosophy. Dr. Dotson has published (and co-published) numerous journal articles on epistemic oppression, diversity in philosophy, and various topics in Black feminist theory. She is currently working on a monograph aimed at, what she calls, Black girl world building, entitled Love Politic.

Dr. Susanna Siegel received her PhD from Cornell University. She currently works on topics in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. She is author of The Contents of Visual Experience (Oxford University Press, 2010), The Rationality of Perception (Oxford University Press, 2017), and numerous articles about perception, its many roles in the mind, and its relationships to probability, culture, politics and journalism. In addition to publishing in many different academic venues designed for specialists, she has written pieces aimed at wider audiences on politics, death, schadenfreude, mob violence, vigilantism, and principles for journalism, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, New Philosopher magazine, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Washington University Review of Philosophy. You can hear her discuss the interconnections between these topics on the 5 Questions podcast.

Professors Dotson and Siegel’s topic for the 2023 Lebowitz Prize is "Norms of Attention." They will present their views and engage in a dialogue at an annual Lebowitz symposium, held during an APA divisional meeting, and in an episode of the podcast Key Conversations with Phi Beta Kappa.

Nominations/applications for the 2024 Lebowitz Prize will open in early fall 2023; the deadline is November 30, 2023. Please click here for more information.