Dr Martin Pickup, the Turpin JRF at Oriel College, has won the Marc Sanders Prize in Metaphysics, a biennial prize awarded by the Marc Sanders Foundation to philosophers who are within 15 years of the completion of their PhD. Metaphysics is one of his main areas of Martin's research, along with early modern philosophy and the philosophy of religion.
Martin was awarded the prize for his paper 'The Situationalist Account of Change'. The paper is about how objects continue to exist through change. Martin's basic idea is that change involves fundamental disagreement about what properties objects have. This disagreement fractures the world into different, incompatible parts, and these can't be easily put back together again.
Martin was awarded a cash prize of $5000 and his paper will be published in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. More information and a copy of the paper is available on the Marc Sanders Foundation website.
Alex Kaiserman, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Fairfax Fellow and Tutor at Balliol, was also singled out for praise by the committee for his paper 'The Logic of Past Alteration'.
