Akshath Jitendranath wins the Isaac Levi Prize

Akshath Jitendranath, a post-doctoral fellow at the Opening Economics Chair, has won the Isaac Levi Prize in 2023. Created in 2019 and awarded by The Journal of Philosophy, this is the most prestigious prize for a young philosopher. The prize is $10,000 and publication in the March 2024 edition of The Journal of Philosophy.

Akshath won the award for his paper “Optimization and Beyond”. In this paper, he explores the notion that when faced with a situation where an optimal alternative cannot be chosen due to the incomplete nature of binary preferences or value relations, a genuine dilemma arises - a hard choice. However, situations where the inability to optimize stems from a cyclic relation do not qualify as hard choices.