Stevenson

The Department awards the Charles L. Stevenson Prize, funded by the Marshall M. Weinberg Endowment for the Frankena and Stevenson Prizes, for excellence in a dossier. The prize is awarded near the close of the Winter Term. To be eligible for consideration, a student must have already achieved candidacy. The Department automatically considers all eligible students for the Stevenson Prize.

When Charles Stevenson published Ethics and Language in 1944, it was the most influential book in meta-ethics since G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, first published more than forty years earlier. It went through many printings and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Japanese. Steve, as he was known in the Department, taught at Michigan for thirty-one years. He was an accomplished pianist and cellist, and his publications in aesthetics reflected his deep interest in music. As recounted by Arthur Burks, Stevenson's philosophical pedagogy included a tale of neurosurgeons implanting electrodes in a brain -- on an operating table, not in a vat -- to dictate subjective experiences. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Science, he served as President of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association.