As Brian announced, Paul Horwich, the eminent NYU philosopher, was the sole recipient in philosophy of a Guggenheim award this year. In contrast, by my count at least 20 historians received Guggenheim Fellowships. Furthermore, Prof. Horwich’s own project, like the majority of successful Guggenheim Fellowships by philosophers in recent years, is itself historical (on Wittgenstein). There is clearly some kind of message that the Guggenheim Foundation is trying to deliver here…

UPDATE: I received the following email message from a philosopher who has previously won a Guggenheim Fellowship:

Re your latest Guggie-post, the situation may actually be a bit more sinister. One year recently both philosophy awards went to ancient philosophers. A year or so later two guys at Chicago got the only philosophy Guggies and on topics that can only be described as falling into the same, relatively narrow equivalence class. Haven’t done further fact checking.  But as they say go figure.

[I assume that the second year referred to by this philosopher was 2003, when Arnold Davidson, John Haugeland, and Sean Dorrance Kelly won Guggenheim Fellowships.  Their projects, respectively, were titled "Spiritual Exercises in Philosophy", "An Interpretation of Heidegger", and "Phenomenology, Consciousness, and Embodiment". Obviously, these are projects worth funding (as is ancient philosophy!), and the philosophers in question are important scholars. But  I guess the point is that one could expect a more representative sample of current philosophy than the Guggenheim foundation has selected in recent years.]