The University of Pittsburgh has named Ernest Sosa as the inaugural awardee of the recently established Nicholas Rescher Prize for contributions to systematic philosophy. Named in honor of a distinguished philosopher who has been on Pitt’s faculty since 1961, the prize consists of a gold medal together with a sum of $25,000.
Born in Cuba in 1940, Ernest Sosa earned his doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh in 1964. From that time until 2007, Sosa taught at Brown University. He then joined the Philosophy Department at Rutgers University, which he had visited as a distinguished professor for a decade before that. At Rutgers, he is now Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy.
Sosa has served as a president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) and as editor of the prestigious journals Nous and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 2005, and the Paul Carus Lectures at the American Philosophical Association in 2010. His work is the subject of John Greco (ed.), Ernest Sosa and his Critics (2004). His contributions to epistemology-- and to virtue epistemology in particular--are widely appreciated as a groundbreaking unification of ideas from epistemology, value theory, and ethics.
The prize is named in honor of Nicholas Rescher who has served on the Philosophy faculty since 1951 and has served as a President of the American Philosophical Association, of the American Catholic Philosophy Association, of the American G. W. Leibniz Society, of the C. S. Peirce Society, and of the American Metaphysical Society as well as Secretary General of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Sciences. Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, he is the recipient of eight honorary degrees from universities on three continents. He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984, the Belgian Prix Mercier in 2005, and the Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 2007.