Kornelsen Essay Prize

Isaak Kornelsen

The Isaak Kornelsen Memorial Undergraduate Essay Prize in Philosophy is awarded each year for the best undergraduate student essay written for a University of Alberta undergraduate Philosophy course in the award school year. To be considered, students should send their paper as a Word doc or pdf file by email to the Undergraduate Program Director and provide their name, ID number, and the number and instructor of the PHIL course for which the paper was written. The essay should be anonymized, since the adjudication by the Undergraduate Studies and Teaching Committee is by blind review. The Kornelsen Essay follows a No AI usage policy for all submissions. Students can but need not revise their paper prior to submission. Papers should not be more than 20 pages double spaced. Honors Theses are not eligible. Limit is one submission per student per year. The deadline for submission is May 15 each year.

The essay prize has been created in memory of Isaak Kornelsen, a former undergraduate student of philosophy. Isaak died in a tragic traffic accident on August 27, 2012. Isaak was a double major in Philosophy and in Science, Technology, and Society. He was known by his teachers as a gifted and dedicated student. Philosophy Adjunct Professor Nathan Kowalsky describes Isaak as "absolutely outstandingly brilliant" and as "one of those people you just love to hang out with, love to chat with, every time you saw him you just smiled." The members of the Department of Philosophy mourn the passing of Isaak Kornelsen, and extend their wishes and sympathies to Isaak's family and friends. Isaak will be missed by his instructors and fellow students in our department.

This prize was awarded for the first time in 2014.

Past Winners:

  • 2026: Munroe Larison, “Interpreting Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument: Why Kripke’s Constructive Reading Misrepresents His Therapeutic Intentions”
  • 2025: Lee Lopez Seeram, “Folk Guilt v. Legal Guilt: The Problem of Jury Partiality”
  • 2024: Eric Dierich, "Flawed Ideology and Phenomenological Identification"
  • 2023: Suntie Hienkeo, "Trumping Preemption Does Not Exist"
  • 2022: Jadon Meliefste, "Getting a Grasp on Emptiness: Explicating Nagarjuna’s Theory of Emptiness Within an Epistemological Framework"
  • 2021: Tyler Paetkau, "Degrees of Harm and Legitimacy: Inductive Risk and Epistemically Detrimental Dissent in the Sciences"
  • 2020: Duncan McCallum, “Pacifist or Realist? Augustine on the Ethics of Warfare"       
  • 2019: Jonah Dunch, "Enjoyment, Self-Actualization, and the Good Life: Towards an Interspecific Objective List Theory of Wellbeing"
  • 2018: Jonah Dunch: "Imagining Fictions: Moral Education and Make-Believe in Qalupalik"
  • 2017: Aaron Mazo: "Heidegger in Love: The Lover as Absolute Other"
  • 2016: Christian Degrand, "See My Magic, Virtue Ethics, and Actions"
  • 2015: Trevor Breen, "The Experience of the Saturated Phenomenom"
  • 2014: Michael Lang, "Adaptationism and Pluralism: Accounting for Observation in Evolutionary Methodology"