Saint Michael’s philosophy professor Kuklok gets major NEH grant

Allison Kuklok of the Saint Michael’s College philosophy faculty learned this month that she is the recipient of a prestigious, highly competitive $60,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) year-long Fellowship, which she will use to work on a book about the status of the human being in John Locke’s natural philosophy.

She said a big part of her project will look at Locke’s views on language, and how language informs our picture of the world. “Locke was living in a time of great conflict and upheaval, and he thought that some of the sources of disagreement that he saw in politics, religion, and philosophy could be remedied if only we were more careful about how we form our beliefs, and how we attach meanings to our words,” she said. “One ambition of my project is to better understand these remedies, possibly with an eye to thinking about the sources of political disagreement in our own time.”