2026 Sanders Prize in Metaphysics Winners Announced
The Marc Sanders Foundation has announced that its 2026 Prize in Metaphysics has been awarded to Ezra Rubenstein and Verónica Gómez-Sánchez (both of UC Berkeley) for their paper, “Logical Atomism“.
Here’s the abstract of the paper:
The core of logical atomism is the view that fundamental reality is logically simple. We lay out several motivations for this view, and distinguish three ways of developing it: Generative Atomism (roughly, all logically complex facts are generated by atomic facts); Structural Atomism (roughly, no logical notions carve reality at the joints); and Eliminative Atomism (roughly, there are no logical entities). We take Eliminative Atomism to be a natural consequence of Structural Atomism, and argue that their combination fits the motivations for logical atomism much better than Generative Atomism does. We then develop the idea that truthmaker semantics can be used to explain how logically complex sentences can be meaningful (and true) despite there being no logically complex propositions for them to express. We end by briefly discussing some challenges to the resulting view.