UIC faculty scholar awarded top humanities fellowship

Daniel Sutherland, associate professor of philosophy, is the recipient of a $45,000 fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Daniel Sutherland, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has been named a recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship award, which support humanities and social science research.

Sixty-nine fellows were selected from nearly 1,100 applicants through a rigorous, multistage peer review process.

With the support of a $45,000 award, Sutherland will spend a year researching and writing a book exploring Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of mathematics and theory of magnitudes — such as distances, areas and volumes — which were influenced by the Greek mathematician Euclid.

The fellowship comes at a “crucial time,” Sutherland said, “and will allow me to complete this long-term project on Kant’s philosophy of mathematics, drawing out how differently Kant thought about mathematics from the way we do today, and looking to Kant for insights into mathematical cognition.”

The project, “Kant’s Philosophy and the Question of Mathematical Knowledge,” is an extension of Sutherland’s earlier National Science Foundation-funded work that investigated early understandings of magnitudes, provided a historical view of Kant’s theories, and gave perspective on Kant’s work as it relates to contemporary debates in mathematics.

Sutherland joined the UIC philosophy department in 1999 and has published widely on Kant’s philosophy of mathematics and science. Among his other honors is a grant from the American Philosophical Society.

Founded in 1919, the American Council of Learned Societies is a private, nonprofit federation that seeks to advance studies in all fields in the humanities and the social sciences. The fellowship program is funded by the council’s endowment, which has received contributions from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the council’s college and university associates, past fellows and other individual donors.