The Division of Arts and Humanities is thrilled to announce that Assistant Professors Ezra Rubenstein and Verónica Gomez Sanchez (Both of the Philosophy Department), have been awarded the 2026 Prize in Metaphysics by the Marc Sanders Foundation
The Marc Sanders Prize in Metaphysics is a biennial essay competition open to scholars who are within fifteen (15) years of receiving a Ph.D. or students who are currently enrolled in a graduate program.
This year the panel of judges consisted of David Builes, Cian Dorr, John Hawthorne, Kristie Miller, and Alyssa Ney; and they had a particularly difficult job: There was a lot of reading to do — more than usual, with a record 54 submissions — and many worthy essays to choose from. The winning paper is “Logical Atomism”, jointly authored by Ezra and Verónica.
Ezra Rubenstein is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. His main research interests are in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of physics, and metaphysics. He is currently working on projects concerning probability, explanation, causation, identity, fundamentality, physicalism, and logical atomism.
Verónica Gómez Sánchez is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. Her main research interests lie in the intersection of philosophy of science, metaphysics and cognitive science. Some of her recent work deals with the laws and vocabularies of the special sciences, and their relation to physics. She is also interested in the nature of intentionality and its role in computational explanations in cognitive science.
Please join us in congratulating Professor Rubenstein and Gómez for their achievements!