2026 Lebowitz Prize Awarded to Philosophers Felipe De Brigard and Sarah Robins 

WASHINGTON, DC – August 25, 2026 – The American Philosophical Association (APA) and the Phi Beta Kappa Society (ΦBK) are pleased to announce that Felipe De Brigard, Duke University, and Sarah Robins, Purdue University, have won the 2026 Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution. Awarded annually by ΦBK in conjunction with the APA, this prize recognizes outstanding achievement in the field of philosophy. Each recipient will be awarded an honorarium of $25,000. 

The Lebowitz Prize was established in 2012 by a generous bequest from Eve Lewellis Lebowitz in honor of her late husband, Martin R. Lebowitz, a distinguished philosophical critic. Each year, the prize recognizes two philosophers who hold contrasting views on a significant philosophical question of current interest. Through the annual Lebowitz Symposium and related public programming, the prize promotes philosophical inquiry while demonstrating the value of reasoned dialogue in exploring complex ideas. 

Professor De Brigard and Professor Robins' topic for the 2026 Lebowitz Prize is "The Distinctiveness of Memory." Their dialogue explores a fundamental question at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience: What distinguishes memory from other cognitive capacities? While Professor De Brigard questions whether memory can be defined by a single distinguishing characteristic, Professor Robins argues that it remains a distinctive feature of human cognition. Together, their contrasting perspectives embody the spirit of intellectual exchange at the heart of the Lebowitz Prize. They will present their views and engage in discussion at the annual Lebowitz Symposium, held during an upcoming American Philosophical Association divisional meeting, and in an episode of the podcast “Key Conversations with Phi Beta Kappa.” 

About the 2026 Lebowitz Prize Recipients 

Felipe De Brigard, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Departments of Philosophy and Psychology & Neuroscience and a member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University. He is also Principal Investigator of the Imagination and Modal Cognition Laboratory within the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. De Brigard earned a bachelor's degree from the National University of Colombia, where he studied philosophy and neuropsychology. He then earned a master’s degree from Tufts University, where he studied philosophy and cognitive science, and a doctoral degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he studied philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. Before arriving at Duke, he spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Lab and the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. De Brigard has published several books, including “Clinical and Cognitive Neuropsychology” (UN Bogota), “Neuroscience and Philosophy” (MIT Press), and “Memory and Remembering” (Cambridge University Press), as well as over 130 articles in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscientific venues. His research focuses on the nature of memory and its relations to other cognitive faculties, such as perception, imagination, attention, and consciousness, and he is also interested in the foundations of neuroscience and moral psychology. De Brigard is co-director of the Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy, which has been hosted every year at Duke University since 2016. Since 2021, he has directed Duke's Memory and Forgiveness project, which takes place both in the United States and in Colombia.   

Sarah Robins (ΦBK, Hendrix College) is a Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. She is also the founding co-director of Purdue’s Cognition, Agency, and Intelligence Center and past President of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Her academic interests have long been at the intersection of philosophy and the mind sciences. She holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and psychology from Hendrix College and earned her Ph.D. from the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on memory, through which she discusses a range of issues in philosophy of mind, psychology, and neuroscience. Much of her recent work centers on the concept of the memory trace, or engram, and the role it plays in both everyday and scientific thinking about remembering. In addition to her own writing, she created and edits The Memory Palace, a public-facing Substack that functions as a group blog for philosophers of memory, with posts available in four languages. 

Nominations for the 2027 Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution will open later this year. For more information about the prize and the nomination process, please visit pbk.org/awards/lebowitz.