PhD student Tom Oberle awarded SSHRC doctoral fellowship and President’s Doctoral Prize of Distinctio

Tom Oberle has been awarded a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship for his research on Modality, Fundamentality, and Metaphysical Foundationalism, which he is pursuing under the supervision of Phil Corkum (Alberta) and Michael Raven (Victoria). Tom was also awarded the President’s Doctoral Prize of Distinction, a top-up award given to exceptional students who have won one of the major doctoral-level scholarships.

His project is titled “The Regress and Ground of Being” and here’s a description of it:

Metaphysical foundationalists believe that an infinite regress of ontological dependence or grounding would be vicious and so must eventually terminate in something fundamental. On this view, reality itself is characterized by a hierarchy of levels, which are ultimately grounded in a fundamental level, beyond which there is no further dependence. My project attempts to defend a regress argument for foundationalism and explores the relationship between the principle of sufficient reason and conceptions of fundamentality.

Congratulations, Tom!