Prizes

At the end of each academic year, the Philosophy Department awards the Jonathan Edwards prize for the best essay by an undergraduate philosophy major, among those nominated by philosophy department instructors. If you have an essay you would like considered, contact your instructor about nominating it. 

The Jonathan Edwards Essay Prize: Awardees

2025Sam Simon, “Hierarchy for Benefit: Plato’s Republic as Totalitarian but not Tyrannical”
2024Lucy Palacios, “Navigating the Moral Landscape of Art Appreciation and Engagement in the Works of Morally Compromised Artists”
2023Harry Honig, “Agent-Regret and Regret Consequentialism”
2022Callie Harry, “Parfit on Personal Identity”
Ethan Hansen, “Faith in Humanity”
2021Zachary Roberts, “Keeping up with the Joneses: Amour Propre, Superior Standing, and the Origin of Inequality”
Owen Ezell, “Williams on Personal Identity”
2020Akshan deAlwis, “Defending the Equal Weight View”
2019Issa Sayegh, “The Nature of Properly Basic Belief and a Defense of Plantinga’s Reformed Epistemology”
2018Zoey Payne, “Evidence and Agency: The Collapse of the Sartrean Response”
Atticus Meche, “Fodor and Innate Concepts”
2017Zoey Payne, “Emotion and Literature”
2016Haley Schilling, “Born This Way: The Search for the Cause of Same-Sex Attraction”
Haley Schilling, “Belief Forming Processes are Rationally Permissive”
2014Nicholas Vallone, “Kant and the Problem of Other Minds”
2013Joseph Gamache, “C. S. Lewis and the Argument Against Naturalism”
2012Benny Mattis, “Meaning Like we Mean It”
2010Michael Demo, “Cartesian Trialism and Mind-Body Interactionism”
Nicholas Helpa, “Are Moral Reasons Practical?”
Robert Muckle, “Properties, Propositions, and Weak Gloabal Supervenience as a Dependence Relation”
2008Annalee Locke, “Agency and Action”
2007Timothy Prisk, “Aristotle on Friendship”
2006Timothy Prisk, “Shifting the Begriffsschrift: Rescontructing Frege‘s Logicism in Relevant Logic”
Byron Wallace, “Responses to the “Fine-Tuning Argument”
2005Paul Dubois, “In Defense of Exaggeration”
Jeremy Browne, “St Augustine, The Problem of Evil, and William Shakespeare”
2004Christopher Nason, “Russellian Responses to Kripkean Objections to the Theory of Definite Descriptions”
Paul Dubois, “Anselm‘s Devil”
Jesse Kuchin, “Eminent Containment in Descartes’ Theory of Causation”
Keira Manikoff, “Mind-Body Interation, Descartes’ Causal Principles, and the Third Substance Theory”
2003Thomas Kushin, “The Kalam Cosmological Argument of Al-Ghazali”
Krista Meyer, “Augustine‘s Account of Signification”