The division is proud to announce that Professor Hannah Ginsborg in the Department of Philosophy, has been awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for 2025. Ginsborg, who has been a member of the Berkeley faculty since 1988, is recognized for her innovative scholarship on Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, particularly his theories on judgment and cognition.
With the support of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Ginsborg will take a sabbatical from teaching and administration to focus on writing her forthcoming book, Normativity Without Reasons. In this work, she will explore her theory that normativity—the understanding of rules and expectations—is a more fundamental concept than rationality itself. Ginsborg’s research will investigate how young children develop a sense of norms before they can understand the reasoning behind them, offering new insights into concept acquisition and language learning.
This award, underwritten by the Hocking-Cabot Fund for Systematic Philosophy, enables Ginsborg to pursue her groundbreaking research on the nature of human cognition, thinking, and language, while also highlighting her contributions to contemporary philosophy. The Guggenheim Fellowship is one of the most esteemed honors in academia, and Ginsborg joins a distinguished group of intellectuals whose work continues to shape and deepen our understanding of the world.
We congratulate Professor Ginsborg on this exceptional achievement and look forward to the impact her forthcoming book will have on the field of philosophy.