The Cheryl Frank Committee has decided to award the Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize* for 2012 jointly to Ruth Groff, Ontology Revisited: Metaphysics in Social and Political Philosophy and Nick Hostettler, Eurocentrism: A Marxian Critical Realist Critique. The Committee did not feel it could separate these impressive and ground-breaking pieces of work. Both books are worthy winners.
Ontology Revisited is a finely chiseled and sustained demonstration of the inexorability of ontology. It draws very persuasively on the resources of original critical realism to show how modern social and political philosophy, pace ‘post-metaphysics’, has in fact been dominated by an implicit Humean ontology via Kant. Eurocentrism, for its part, is innovative in its application of dialectical critical realism and Marx. It succeeds in shifting the debate about eurocentricity decisively onto new terrain, elaborating in the process a systematic anti-eurocentric approach to understanding modernity.
The memorial lectures will be delivered in 2013 or early 2014 at a time and place to be arranged with the winners.
