The Joel Feinberg Award for the Outstanding UTA Philosophy Major
Undergraduate philosophy majors with records of superior academic accomplishment in philosophy are eligible for The Joel Feinberg Award. Each year, the department will award $200 to the outstanding philosophy major.
In order to be considered for this award, you must:
- be a declared philosophy (PHIL) major, with a minimum of 60 hours completed overall;
- have completed at least 12 student credit hours in residence at UTA, including 6 hours of philosophy courses in residence;
- have an overall GPA at UTA of at least 3.00, with a minimum GPA of 3.50 in your UTA philosophy courses; and
- not have won the award in a previous year.
The award honors Joel Feinberg, who is Emeritus Regents’ Professor of Philosophy at The University of Arizona. Professor Feinberg, a past president of The American Philosophical Association, is a preeminent moral, social, political, and legal philosopher. His work ranges from the theory of responsibility (1970) to rights and justice (1980) to the moral limits of the criminal law (1984-1988) to freedom and fulfillment (1992) to problems at the roots of law (2003).
The Wilfrid Sellars Prize in Philosophy
Each spring, current UTA philosophy majors are invited to submit papers in philosophy in competition for the Wilfrid Sellars Prize. The author of the winning paper receives a cash prize of $200.
The prize is named in honor of Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989), whose published work includes significant contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. During his career, Sellars held academic appointments at the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Yale University, and the University of Pittsburgh. He is best known as a critic of foundationalist epistemology and was one of the first functionalists. His classic 1956 essay “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” played a major role in the postwar rejection of Cartesianism.
