Philosophy Professor wins 2009 Provost’s Award, the University of Miami’s highest honor for academic pursuits

UM Provost Thomas J. LeBlanc has honored Philosophy Professor Michael Slote with the 2009 Provost’s Award, the University’s highest honor for scholarly activity during a ceremony March 31 on the Coral Gables campus. The Harvard-educated Slote, an author of 11 books, is known for his groundbreaking work on moral sentimentalism.

Top scholars: Recipients of the 2009 Provost’s Award for Scholarly Activity were honored at a ceremony on March 31. From left, David Birnbach, vice provost for faculty affairs who led the award selection process; Walter Secada, professor and chair of teaching and learning at the School of Education, who accepted the award on behalf of recipient Marjorie Montague,; award winners Bonnie Blomberg and Michael Slote; and Provost Thomas J. LeBlanc.

The Provost’s Awards are designed to foster excellence in research and creative scholarship at the University of Miami. The Provost’s goal is to build a world class research university featuring a renowned community of scholars and robust externally-funded research programs. Marjorie Montague, professor of teaching and learning in the School of Education and Bonnie Blomberg, professor of microbiology and immunology at the Miller School of Medicine were the other recipients.

“The defining characteristic of a modern research university and the source of its academic reputation is the scholarly production of its faculty,” Provost Thomas J. LeBlanc said. “Each of these individuals, chosen by a committee of previous award recipients, is an outstanding scholar and role model for their colleagues and students.”

In The Ethics of Care and Empathy, Slote’s most recently published work; he further advances a sentimentalist theory initiated in his earlier books and papers, showing the basis of morality in human feeling rather than reason or rationality. “There’s been a lot of talk about empathy in American society and culture,” Slote said, noting that while psychologists and evolutionary biologists have studied extensively in this area, philosophers have not delved nearly as much into the theory. “What I’ve tried to do is show why empathy is terribly important to moral philosophy,” Slote continued. “In addition and more general, if empathy’s important to moral philosophy, then the rationalists who say that morality is just a matter of pure reason are missing out on something important to morality, mainly the emotional content.”

In his soon-to-be-published book, Moral Sentimentalism, he writes about this point, arguing that rationalists have missed out on the emotional, empathic side of morality. The text will be part of an Oxford University Press three-book series, which Department of Philosophy Chair Harvey Siegel says “will deepen [Slote’s] contributions to moral theory and further cement his international reputation. Their publication will be a major event for ethicists the world over.”

Slote teaches ethics at UM. He joined the University in the spring 2007.