Alumni & Friends - Ways to get involved and give back
Philosophy

Andrew Lee Wins 2024 Sanders Prize in Metaphysics

Andrew Y. Lee, an Assistant Professor in UTSC’s Department of Philosophy, has won the Marc Sanders Prize in Metaphysics.

The Marc Sanders Foundation awards biennial essay prizes for early-career scholars in many core areas of philosophy, administered by some of the most distinguished philosophers in the world.

The Sanders Prize in Metaphysics is a $5,000 biennial prize administered by Dean Zimmerman, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, and open only to scholars who are within fifteen (15) years of receiving a Ph.D. or students who are currently enrolled in a graduate program.” The winning prize will appear in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics

 

Professor Andrew Y. Lee on winning the Sanders Prize:

"Most people think of me as a philosopher of consciousness. But I’m secretly interested in almost every topic in contemporary analytic philosophy, and I’ve aimed to let my research be guided by whatever strikes my curiosity. With this award, I feel especially grateful that some of my work outside of consciousness is getting recognized.

A few years ago, I became interested in a philosophical puzzle associated with Riemann’s Rearrangement Theorem, a mathematical theorem that says that the sum of an infinite series of numbers can sometimes depend on the order in which those numbers occur. The paper is framed around that philosophical puzzle, but the bigger ambition of the paper is to motivate some general ideas about the metaphysics of quantities and locations. Those ideas are applicable not only to the puzzle at the heart of the paper, but also to questions concerning infinite ethics, infinite decision theory, and some classic paradoxes concerning “supertasks.""
 

Abstract:

A famous mathematical theorem says that the sum of an infinite series of numbers can depend on the order in which those numbers occur. Suppose we interpret the numbers in such a series as representing instances of some physical quantity, such as the weights of a collection of items. The mathematics seems to lead to the result that the weight of a collection of items can depend on the order in which those items are weighed. But that is very hard to believe!
 
A puzzle then arises: How do we interpret the metaphysical significance of this mathematical theorem? I first argue that prior solutions to the puzzle lead to implausible consequences. Then I develop my own solution, where the basic idea is that the weight of a collection of items is equal to the limit of the weights of its finite subcollections contained within ever-expanding regions of space. I show how my solution is intuitively plausible and philosophically motivated, how it reveals an underexplored line of metaphysical inquiry about quantities and locations, and how it elucidates some classic puzzles concerning supertasks.