Carol Lee Price admired great thinkers. Now, a fellowship in her name brings bright minds to Berkeley.

woman gazes at camera

Carol Lee Price graduated from UC Berkeley in 1970 and remained intellectually curious throughout her life.

Alva Noe holding his book "the entanglement"
Professor Alva Noë at SF MOMA for the Berkeley Art, Finance, and Law Symposium hosted by Berkeley Law (photo by Jim Block).
August 6, 2024

Top philosophy graduate students from around the world are finding their way to UC Berkeley thanks to a recently established fellowship that enriches the discipline with new approaches.

The fellowship honors Carol Lee Price, a Berkeley alum who led a curiosity-driven life. Price was born in Cleveland to a Jewish family that emphasized education as an object of value that no one could take away. Whenever she moved, she took the knowledge she had gained with her.

Price found a home at Berkeley, where she majored in English and participated in the early days of the Free Speech Movement. She was a dancer with a strong interest in mathematics who befriended many accomplished novelists, philosophers, and legal scholars. She conducted research for UCLA’s psychology department and wrote evaluations of educational programs. Her many passions enriched her life and the lives of those around her.

After Price passed away in 2016, her estate’s trustees searched for ways to carry on her inquisitive approach to life through a new generation of students. The trustees began with the Weinstein Fellowship in honor of Price’s late friend, Craig, who graduated from Berkeley Law in 1978. The endowed fund supports an annual, one-week residency by a distinguished scholar recognized for their work in moral, legal, or political philosophy.

The trustees felt the initiative embodied Price’s passion for intellectual debate and decided to expand their partnership, this time in the Department of Philosophy.

The Carol Lee Price Fellowship in Philosophy covers three years of out-of-state tuition for Ph.D. students hailing from outside the United States and Canada. Those additional costs can be dramatic, reaching tens of thousands of dollars and putting UC Berkeley out of reach for top prospects.

The fellowship aims to attract candidates whose interdisciplinary backgrounds ground their philosophical work: ancient philosophy experts trained in the classics; human rights and social justice scholars with experience in law, economics, or political science; and mind and language theorists educated in psychology, neuroscience, or linguistics.

“The Carol Lee Price Fellowship has made it possible for the Department of Philosophy to be more successful recruiting outstanding international applications,” said Alva Noë, the department chair. “This is a huge boon for us — we set our sights on supporting philosophy at the highest levels everywhere — and especially for the students, who gain much-needed support in achieving their educational goals.”

So far, the fellowship has sponsored three graduate students: Luna Cheng and Anhui Huang of China and Aglaia von Götz of Switzerland. There are plans to fund three more.

Cheng is the program’s most recent fellow. She appreciates the fellowship for helping her afford Berkeley as well as its aim to diversify the ranks of preeminent philosophers. While studying in Hong Kong, Cheng had no female professors in her undergraduate department. She anticipates that the Carol Lee Price Fellowship will open up career pathways into academia by making graduate programs more available to a broader range of people.

Cheng is particularly interested in how experience can influence perception. She notes how yoga and meditation have enhanced her research into the connection between mind and body and introduced her to Buddhist theories about emotions, sensations, and bodily knowledge

“Through these practices, I am able to carry out my research in a more comprehensive and well-grounded way,” said Cheng. “Philosophy has become both an academic interest and a practical way of life for me. The practical experience helps bring my research beyond paper reading and introduces new raw materials for my research, while the research helps to guide my practice and develop new ideas from experiences.”

The other fellows also bring their life experiences into their research. When von Götz was 11 years old, she moved to a new country where residents spoke a different language. She has now lived in seven countries and speaks five languages with varying degrees of fluency. Sometimes, she feels like she is not fully native in any language.

“Maybe that helps motivate me to research these puzzles that would not puzzle native speakers,” said von Götz, “and thereby better understand language.”

Von Götz studies copredication, a phenomenon in which speakers attribute intuitively incompatible properties to an object. For example, most people can understand the sentence, “My lunch was delicious but lasted forever.” However, if “lunch” refers to an event, a description of its taste seems out of place, and if “lunch” refers to a physical object, then it is odd to mention its duration. Von Götz brings an interdisciplinary approach to her research by incorporating linguistics, psychology, and sociology.

“My background has definitely shaped how I approach philosophy,” said von Götz. “Philosophy is about trying to express very hard ideas in simple terms. Having experience with different cultures and different ways of communicating helps to understand other people's ideas. It's also taught me to stay curious about things that I might not understand at first.”

Huang feels similarly about her studies in the philosophy of language, especially the relationship between knowledge and certainty. 

“Being a bilingual, non-native speaker of English,” said Huang, “I try to be sensitive to whether the phenomenon we are investigating is a peculiarity of English or a general cross-linguistic phenomenon.”

Huang hopes to become an academic and possibly influence the public conversation around key philosophical debates.

“I have found the philosophical community at Berkeley to be collaborative and stimulating, and I’m very happy to be here,” said Huang. “Berkeley has a relatively high cost of living, and I am grateful for the funding package that I received, which allowed me to focus on my learning and research without having to worry too much about my financial situation.”

Graduate-level philosophy requires intellectual and ideological challenges to overcome internalized assumptions and stimulate new ideas. The Carol Lee Price Fellowship provides fresh perspectives while enhancing the university’s global competitiveness in recruiting deep thinkers.

“The most important thing is finding people who can think outside the box,” said Andrea Falcon, one of the trustees of Price’s estate, about the fellowship. “We want to take people with different insights, mix them together, and come up with something new.”


Learn more about the Carol Lee Price Fellowship.

To support graduate student fellowships in the arts and humanities, contact Jesse Antin.

From left: Anhui Huang, Aglaia von Götz, and Luna Cheng

From left: Anhui Huang, Aglaia von Götz, and Luna Cheng