Prizes

Prizes in the Graduate Program

The Jentzsch Prize is given in memory of Gus Jentzsch, who was a PhD student in philosophy at CU in the late 1960s and died young of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He was regarded by the faculty as a superb and gifted philosopher. Jentzsch chose to spend his last summer doing philosophy with his advisor Prof. Jim Kimble rather than go on holiday with his girlfriend. After he died, friends and faculty members endowed a fund to honor his memory. Every spring we have a contest with submissions by graduate students, and the winner is given the Jentzsch prize for best graduate student paper of the year. It is meant to recognize sound scholarship and original thinking in philosophy.

The Jentzsch Prize is awarded once a year, and includes a cash award of $500, formal recognition at the spring commencement ceremony, and an invitation to present the paper as part of next year's Colloquium series. Submissions should be prepared for blind review. A call for submissions is usually announced in mid-spring semester, and the winner is announced at the end of the semester.

Past recipients of the Jentzsch prize include:

  • Jason Hanna (2005)
  • John Ivy (2006)
  • Jason Wyckoff (2007) "On the Failure of the Fair Play Account of Political Obligation"
  • Kristin Mickelson (2008) "The Soft-Line Solution to Pereboom's Four-Case Argument"
  • Jennifer Kling (2009) "Mind-Body Interaction in Descartes: An Argument for the Extensionless Location of the Mind"
  • Noel Saenz (2010) "Is Modal Fictionalism a Fiction?"
  • Christian Lee (2011) "Vague Intuitions and Knowledge"
  • Noel Saenz (2012) "A Non-Revisionary Solution to the Grounding Problem"
  • Martín Chamorro (2013) "Proportionality and Borders"
  • Kelly Weirich (2014) "Conditional Flexibility"
  • Tyler Huismann (2015) "Aristotle on Accidental Causation"
  • Ben Rohrs (2016) "Supervaluational Propositional Content"
  • Spencer Case (2017) "From Epistemic to Moral Realism"
  • Zak Kopeikin (2018) "The Moral Epistemology of Bare-Difference Methodology"
  • Alexander Wolf-Root (2019) "Pre-Game Cheating and Playing the Game"
  • Bret Donnelly (2020) " Vagueness, Degrees of Truth, and Dutch Books"
  • Samuel Director (2021) "Of Blood Transfusions and Feeding Tubes: Anorexia-Nervosa and Consent"
  • Tyler Porter (2022) "Fortune"
  • Connor Kianpour (2023) "Colorblindness, Vindicated"
  • Owen Forbes (2024) "Metaphysical Laws and the Directionality of Groundingâ€

The Stahl Prize is given in memory of Professor Gary Stahl, who taught at CU from 1962 to 1996. It recognizes a graduate student who has made a significant contribution toward bringing the discipline of philosophy to bear on some demanding and crucial human problem.

Gary Stahl was a much beloved philosophy professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and a lifelong community activist and leader in Boulder for 35 years. He was born in Trenton, N.J., was educated at Williams College, and went on to receive a master's degree from Brown University and a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University. He was the author of Human Transactions: The Emergence of Meaning in Time (Temple University Press 1995), and the author of numerous papers in areas including aesthetics, Aristotle's ethics, J.S. Mill, and Kant.  He served on numerous boards of organizations committed to peace and conflict resolution. In 1988, he was awarded the Thomas Jefferson Award from the University of Colorado for his scholarship, teaching, and writing, reflecting broad interests in literature, arts and sciences, and public affairs; a strong concern for the advancement of individual civic responsibility; and a profound commitment to the welfare and rights of the individual. In 1998, he was awarded the Boulder Daily Camera's Pacesetter Award for his significant contributions to health and medicine.

A generous tribute to Prof. Stahl was given in the  given in 2013 by the distinguished philosopher of science, Prof. Elisabeth Lloyd, graduate of our undergraduate program in 1980.

The prize comes with a cash award of $500, as well as formal recognition of the honor at the department’s spring commencement ceremony.

Past recipients of the Stahl Prize include:

  • Robert Figueroa (1998)
  • Shelley Wilcox (2001)
  • Teresa Weynand-Tobin (2005)
  • Scott Wisor (2006, 2007)
  • Corwin Aragon (2006)
  • Gustavo Oliveira (2008, 2009)
  • David Meens (2010)
  • Martín Chamorro (2011)
  • Annaleigh Curtis (2013)
  • Spencer Case (2015)
  • Cheryl Abbate (2016)
  • Mark Boespflug (2017)
  • Maggie Taylor (2018)
  • Alexander Wolf-Root (2019)
  • Alexander Wolf-Root (2020)
  • Samuel Director (2021)
  • Megan Kitts (2022)
  • Dawn Jacob (2023)
  • Idowu Odeyemi (2024)

The Stahl Prize includes a cash award of $500, and recognition at the spring commencement ceremony.

The Department established in 2014 two teaching prizes for our graduate student teachers, the Claudia Mills Teaching Prize for the outstanding Teaching Assistant of the year, and the Wes Morriston Teaching Prize for the outstanding Graduate Part-Time Instructor of the year. The prizes are awarded each year to two graduate students, and are intended both to recognize outstanding teaching of undergraduates in the philosophy department, as well as to acknowledge Prof. Mills’ and Prof. Morriston’s own outstanding contributions to undergraduate teaching during their own career.

Each prize comes with $500, and formal recognition of the honor at the department’s spring commencement ceremonies.

Past recipients of the Mills Prize:

  • Alexander Zambrano (2015)
  • Zak A. Kopeikin (2016)
  • Jasmine Carter (2017)
  • Alexandra Lloyd (2018)
  • Samuel Director (2019)
  • Thomas Bonn (2020)
  • Dawn Jacob and Megan Kitts (2021)
  • Jenn Gallagher (2022)
  • Evan Frook (2023)
  • Matthew Wennemann (2024)

Past recipients of the Morriston Prize:

  • Andrew Chapman (2015)
  • Matthew Pike (2016)
  • Dan Lowe (2017)
  • Ben Kultgen (2018)
  • Caleb Pickard (2019)
  • Maggie Taylor (2020)
  • Erich Riesen (2021)
  • Dawn Jacob (2022)
  • Tommy Bonn (2023)
  • Connor Kianpour (2024)