Andrew Y. Lee, an assistant professor in the department of philosophy at U of T Scarborough, has won the Sanders Prize in Metaphysics.
Awarded every two years, the prestigious essay competition includes a cash prize and publication in the journal Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. Lee won the prize for his essay A Puzzle about Sums, which offers a novel solution to a metaphysical puzzle.
“I feel really grateful to receive recognition for my work,” says Lee, who is best known for his work on the philosophy of consciousness, but is interested in most topics in contemporary analytic philosophy.
“It can be hard to break into a literature outside of one’s main area, so I’m glad that the ideas in this paper will receive attention,” he says.
A few years ago he started thinking about a philosophical puzzle associated with Riemann’s Rearrangement Theorem, a mathematical theorem stating that the sum of an infinite series of numbers can sometimes depend on the order in which those numbers occur. The puzzle Lee explored is about how to interpret the metaphysical significance of that mathematical theorem.
He is already developing follow-up work on related topics to those explored in his award-winning essay.