Thomas W Lamont University Professor Amartya Sen has been awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. Sen was awarded the prize for a body of scholarship that "combines insights into human vulnerability with knowledge about the potential of democratic political power to redress and relieve this deprivation." The award ceremony will take place on September 30, 2017 in Uppsala, Sweden and will be accompanied by a public lecture.

The Department of Philosophy congratulates Professor Sen on receiving this well-deserved award.

Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy Tommie Shelby has been named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for 2017. As noted by the philosophy blog Daily Nous, Shelby is one of two philosophers to receive the award this year. According to its website, the...

Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy Susanna Siegel has published a new book, The Rationality of Perception, with Oxford University Press. The Rationality of Perception makes an important contribution to our understanding of the human mind and, specifically, to how we think of perception. According to a traditional conception of the human mind, reasoning can be rational or irrational, but perception cannot. Perception is simply a source of new information, and cannot be assessed for rationality. Susanna Siegel argues that this conception is wrong. Drawing on examples...

In a country of obvious wealth—and one that purports to embrace the ideal of equality of opportunity for all of its citizens—why do American ghettos persist? Many theories have been advanced over the years to explain the persistence of American ghettos and various measures proposed and, occasionally, undertaken to address the problem of concentrated urban poverty. But for Tommie Shelby, Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard University, the social scientific discourse about the ghetto has been marked by a curious omission.

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