E. O. Ringstad Memorial Awardees

Ringstad Memorial Prize Winners

The papers are the property of St. Olaf College. Papers may not be used in whole or in part by any entity without prior permission from the department of Philosophy, St. Olaf College.

2022 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Aubrey Connett “Ideas and Material Falsity in Descartes’ Proof of God”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Lila Graham “Transformative Experience, Narrative, and Trans Phenomenology”

2^nd Place: Sean Clements “Does Vogel’s Abductive Argument Succeed”

2019 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

No prize awarded

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Alexander Cavender “To Conquer Suffering, You Only Have to Suffer: Reflections on Humility and Suffering in The Brothers Karamazov“

2^nd Place: Matthew Erickson “Who Has Knowledge?: Interrogating Aristotle’s Science and Craft Knowledge with an Anthropocentric Lens“

2018 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Mattias Kostov “Existentialism and Psychology – A Brief Look at the Kierkegaadian Concept of Anxiety and the Modern Clinical Approach”

No 2^nd place prize awarded

Junior/ Senior Category:

Joint 1^st Place: Matthew Erickson “The Problem of Extra-Rational Persuasion: Why We Must Analyze Both the Motivations We Consider Our Own, and the Ones We Do Not ”

Joint 1st Place: Dempsey Olsen “Brutal Academia: Foucault and Hobbes on Criminality and Punishment”

2^nd Place: Alex Cavender “An Alternate Possibility for the Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will”

 

2017 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Alexander Cavender, “The Nature of Self Abandonment”

2^nd Place: Noah Forslund, “Locke and Leibniz on Innate Ideas”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Alexander Quanbeck “How to Disagree with Epistemic Superiors: Norms of Deferral and their Defeaters”

2^nd Place: Zhaoqi Hu “Without Peer: The Defeater Strategy for Peer Disagreement”

2016 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Elise Steichen, “The Third Meditation and the Cartesian Circle”

2^nd Place: Molly Doda, “Spontaneous Understanding: Leibniz and the Freedom of the Intelligence”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Pedro Monque “On Truth and Logical Fatalism”

2^nd Place: Vera Lochtefeld “Character and Culpability: The Conditions for Moral Responsibility”

2015 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Alexander Quanbeck, “Deontic and Axiological Moral Reasons:  A Skeptical Theist’s Response to Sharon Street”

2^nd Place: Annika Beck, “Worthy of Worship: Leibniz’s God and the Principle of Perfection”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place (Joint Winners): Gregory Gianopoulos “The Experience of Reason: Western Philosophy of Personal Identity in Light of Zen Buddhism”

Meredith Varie, “Jury Education: A Justification for Epistemic Paternalism in Court Cases Involving Complex Expert Testimony

2^nd Place: Thomas Lambert, “Two Problems for “Empathic Access””

 2014 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:      

1^st Place: Pedro Monque, “Unstrapped from the Moving Now: Temporal Perspective as an Answer to Prior’s “Thank Goodness That’s Over” Argument”

2^nd Place: Gregory Gianopoulos, “Reid’s Account of Personal Identity”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place (Joint Winners): Thomas Churchill, “Hermeneutical Consciousness as Journalistic Virtue: Hans-Georg Gadamer and the Debate over Journalistic Objectivity:

Thomas Lambert, “The Autonomy Link: Examining the Role of the Feeling of Respect in Kant’s Theories of Action and Freedom”

2^nd Place: No award given

2013 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Thomas Lambert, “Self-Cultivation: Wisdom according to Plato”

2^nd Place: Liz Brindley, “The Art of Communication”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Michelle Frank, “Constructed Knowledge: Linguistic Perception and the Active Receipt of Testimony”

2^nd Place: Jon Erik Haines, “Gangsta Rap and Nietzche’s Will to Power as Art”

2012 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Thomas Churchill, “Could ‘what it’s like’ be Physical Knowledge?”

No 2^nd Place prize awarded

Junior/ Senior Category:

1st Place: Bjorn Wastvedt, “A Dostoeyevskian Critique of Jeffrie Murphy on Resentment”

2^nd Place: Caleb Harrison, “Criteria for Personal Identity Theory”

2011 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Eric Teachout, “Hobbes and the Fundamental Principle of a Society: A Critque of the Ethical Solidarity of the Leviathan”

2^nd Place: Emmett Larsen, “Is God in Time”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Brady Post, “Potholes on the Road to Kantian Salvation”

2^nd Place: Natasha Fredericks, “Self-Love as the Basis for Friendship and Self-Sacrificial Love”

2010 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Patrick Behling, “Kant’s God of the Gaps”

2nd Place: James Sponsel, “Descartes’ Premature Victory Over Uncertainty”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Maria Squadroni, “The Truth Behind Putnam’s Internalism and Devitt’s Realism”

2^nd Place: Brady Post, “Defending Descartes: Objections and Replies to Cartesian Freedom”

2009 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Michael Smeltzer, “Aristotle and Rawls on Justice”

No 2^nd place prize awarded

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Tom Marti, “The Problem of Evil and the Dependencies of Theodicies”

2^nd Place: Elizabeth Linn, “Yellow on the Outside, White on the Inside: Korean American Adoptee Identity in the Context of Judith Butler’s ‘Gender Performance Critique’”

2008 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Gil Thompson, “I defense of the Nithingale: Criticisms of Nietzsche”

No 2^nd Place: prize awarded

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Joseph Christianson, “A Historicist Approach to the Humean Reduction of the Law of Nature”

2^nd Place (3-way tie): Valerie Deal, “Perdurance: The Only Viable Option”

Brett DeFries, “Wottgenstein and Internal Realism: A Reinterpretation of the Lectures on Religious Belief”

David Moon, “Moral Feeling: A Means of Assuring Moral Culpability and Human Freedom”

2007 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Maria Squadroni, “Ethical Choice in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or”

2^nd Place: Jason Smith, “Plato’s Republic: From Feminism to Philosopher Kings”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Allison Quam, “The Necessity of Narrative: Hermeneutics and Moral Personhood on a Critique of the Episodic Life”

2^nd Place (2-way tie): Nathaniel T. Jopkins, “The Limits of Empathy: An Essay on Otherness” and

Hannah Woldum: “Divine Timelessness: A Solution to the Foreknowledge/Free Will Problem and the Firm Foundation of Practical Catholic Belief”

2006 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Joseph Christianson, “Aitia in Plato’s Phaedo”

2^nd Place: Ross Lambrecht, “Kant’s Categorical Imperative and the ‘Murderer at the Door’”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Jeffery J. Naragon, “Philosophy of Religious Language in the Work of Robert Neville”

2^nd Place: Noreen Johnson, “Divine Omnipotence and Divine Omniscience: A Reply to Michael Martin:

2005 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Brian Jacobson, “The relation of the Finite to the Infinite in Descartes”

2^nd Place: Cindy Wilmeth, “’…and what am I to do about them?’ Evil and the Undeserved Suffering”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Eric Reitz, “Naturalizing the Nietzschean Self”

2^nd Place: Dan Sinykin, “Hegel’s Hopeful Dream” and Erik Christopherson, “Skepticism in Analytic Epistemology”

2004 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

No 1^st or 2^nd prize awarded

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Kathleen Ess, “What’s in a Name?: A summary and brief analysis of Naming and Necessity”

2^nd Place: Dan Sinykin, “Freedom, Illusion, and the Price of Truth”

2003 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Eric Christopherson, “Heidegger’s Ontology: An Answer to Cartesian Skepticism” and Eric Reitz, “Kuhn, the Paradigm of Sisyphus, and the Color Spectrum”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Carl Hughes, “Actualizing the Solitary Self”

2002 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Brigit McGuire, “On the Edge of Justice: Censorship in the Republic”

2^nd Place: Diana Frantz, “The Problem of Evil”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Becky Nixon, “Personal Identity: The Problems with Fetuses and Corpses” and Tim Nelson, “Still Looking Out for Number One: An Objection to Olson’s Use of Brain Fission as Support for the Parfit-Shoemaker Thesis”

2^nd Place: Robert Grace, “The Roman Morality: Isiah Berlin and Richard Rorty on a World Divided in Two”

 2001 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Timothy Nelson, “Reasoning About Faith: An Analysis of Aristotle’s Concept of God and its Conflicts with the God of Christiantiy”

2^nd Place: James Philson, “A One Sided Dialogue with McTaggart: a View on Time”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Owen Schott, “Irony and Dispair: Rorty and Kierkegaard”

2^nd Place: Rebecca Nixon, “Transcendent Love”

2000 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Robert Grace

2^nd Place: Nate Olsen

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Charles Grell and Thomas Hill

1999 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Loran Nordgren, “Cathartic Therapy in Plato’s Meno”

2^nd Place: Peter Pearson, “The Ontological Argument: A True Proof of God?”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Matt Peterson, “Kant’s Transcendental Argument: Diagrammed in Light of Casualty” and Sara Leland, “Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’: Language and the Mystical”

2^nd Place: William Benton, “A Defense of Organized Religion in Light of Kierkegaard’s Criticism of the Same”

 1998 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Owen Schott, “Inevitable Life Outcomes and Genetic Testing”

2^nd Place: Anders Hendrickson, “Natural Evil and the Fall”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Jeremiah Harrelson, “The Morally Obligatory Partiality”

2^nd Place: Susan Keeling, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: The Idea of Meaning as Use”

 1997 Winners

First Year/Sophomore Category

1^st place: Anders Hendrickson, “A Consummation Devoutly to Be Wished…or Not?”

No 2^nd place prize awarded

Junior/Senior Category

1^st place: R. Scott Hanrath, “An Assessment of Schopenhaur’s Pessimism”

2^nd place: James Powell, “The Nature of Kantian Respect in Moral Motivation and the Moral Life”

1996 Winners

First Year/Sophomore Category

1^st place: Eirik Gislason, “Dworhin’s Interesting Error”

No 2^nd place prize awarded

Junior/Senior Category

1^st place: Timothy Loch, “Kant and the Intelligibility of Morality”

2^nd place: Laura Mielke, “Progression and Relative: Zeno’s ‘Achilles’

Paradox” and James Bruss, “Kierkegaard’s Indirect Communication”

1995 Winners

First Year/Sophomore Category

1^st place: Laura Mielke, “A Response to Savile and Newman: Sentimentality, Backlash and Recovery”

2^nd place: Loriann L. Licke, “Ask Aristotle”

Junior/Senior Category

1^st place: Alison Gerlach, “Bergson’s Dualism”

2^nd place: Rolf A. Skar, “A Critique of Truth Claims: an Examination of Han’s Theory of Conventionalism”

1994 Winners

First Year/Sophomore Category

1^st place: Christopher Wells, “Interpreting Burke and Marx”

2^nd place: Rolf Skar, “The Necessity of Evil”

Junior/Senior Category

1^st place: Jonothan Rinehart, “Notionis”

2^nd place: Darren Jackson, “Wittgenstein and the Inverted-Spectrum Thought Experience” and Nathaniel Moir, “The Formulation of the Romantic Period in Aesthetics and Literature”

1993 Winners

First Year/Sophomore Category

1^st place: Melissa Shelton, “God’s Foreknowledge vs. Freedom of Thought”

2^nd place: Alison Gerlach, “Courage and Reason: Virtue Without Fear”

Junior/Senior Category

1^st place: Eric Kiltinen, “A Wittgensteinian Illumination of Karl Barth’s Fideilistic Movement”

2^nd place: Jon Goltz, “Catch and Release: The Philosophy of Fishing for the Future”

1992 Winners

First Year/Sophomore Category

1^st place: Jonathan Stenseth, “The Politics of Modernity: Nietzsche and the Straussians”

2^nd place: Mark Pearson, “Evil: The Perspectives of Sophocles and Plato”

Junior/Senior Category

1^st place: Karen Anway, “Philosophy and Women’s Stories”

2^nd place: Clark Flannery, “Dealing with Death”

1991 Winners

First Year/Sophomore Category

1^st place: Paul Larson, “Of God and Stones: The Paradox of Omnipotence”

and Timothy Wonhof, “Must God Create the Best?”

No 2^nd place prize awarded

Junior/Senior Category

1^st place: Mike Van Quickenborne, “Love: Inclusive or Exclusive”

2^nd place: Dave Gottshling, “Hume and Moral Relativism”

1990 Winners

First Year/Sophomore Category

No prizes awarded

Junior/Senior Category

1^st place: Nate Sawyer, “Autonomism: A Glance by a Philosophical Physician”

2^nd place: Lori Pearson, “Ludwig Feuerbach’s Turn to the Subject”

1989 Winners

First Year/Sophomore Category

No prizes awarded

Junior/Senior Category

1^st place: David Steglich, “Reverse Discrimination: A New and Vulnerable Theory”

2^nd place: David Vessey, “Doing Justice to MacIntyre’s Rationality”

1988 Winners

First Year/Sophomore Category

1^st place: Kevin Wickman, “Born Free”

2^nd place: Stacia Taylor, “Descartes and Human Error”

Junior/Senior Category

1^st place: Peter Termaat, “Wittgenstein on the Nature of Philosophy”

2^nd place: Hans Eisenbeis, “Subject-Object Thought in the Nineteenth Century”

1987 Winners

First Year/Sophomore Category

1^st place: Katheryn Schifferdecker and Timothy Westermeyer

No 2^nd place prize awarded

Junior/Senior Category

1^st place: Cheryl Robey

2^nd place: Susan O’Shaughnessy

1986 Winners

First Year/Sophomore Category

1^st place: Paul Magnuson, “Plato’s Utopian City”

2^nd place: Hans Eisenbeis, “The Theodicity of Karl Marx”

Junior/Senior Category

1^st place: Helen Jones

2^nd place: Tom Twiss

1985 Winners

First Year/Sophomore Category

1^st place: Joan Schansberg and Jonathan Tweet

2^nd place: David A. Olson

Junior/Senior Category

1^st place: Barry Anderson and Mark Johnson

2^nd place: Meg Fleming

1984 Winners

John Mendida, Paul Davies, Helen Jones, David Olson, Mark Johnson, Erik Oasland

1983 Winners

Diana Fritz, Anne Hanson, and Steve Keoy

1982 Winners

Dave Derouf, Michael Swenson, Mark Mottes

1981 Winners

Curt Feig and Lori Anderson

1978 Winners

John Boyce, James Kramka, John Klein, Diane Havlir, Warren Shepard

1976 Winners

First Year/ Sophomore Category:

1^st Place: Curtis Brown, “Metaphoric Meaning: A Model and Some Implications”

2^nd Place: Mark Hulsether, “Forced Personality Change Under a System of Laws”

Junior/ Senior Category:

1^st Place: Scott T. Peterson, “The Moral Justification of Suicide”

1975 Winners

2^nd Place: Per Anderson, “Kaufman’s Notion of God as Agent: Problems and Possibilities”

1974 Winners

1^st Place: Robert L. Mitchell, “’Greater Than’ and the Ontological Argument”

2^nd Place: Steven Thomas Hanson, “The Freedom of the Individual and Restructuring a Lawbreaker’s Personality”