Editor’s introduction
Neil Croally
While the majority of essays in this volume were produced as part of our own extended essay programme (which is clearly in a healthy state), a number were written for prizes. All the essays in the section Freedom , with the exception of Adam Hydari’s, were written under examination conditions in the well-established, inter-school Erasmus competition for older students; Daniel Kamaluddin was awarded the third- place prize. Brian Chau’s essay won first prize in the second year of the Popper Prize , another inter-school competition (for Year 10 students). The judge in this instance was Professor Philip Goff of Durham University, known to those in the philosophical community as the author of Galileo’s Error and, more recently, Why? The Purpose of the Universe . The essays by Daniel O’Connell (year 10), Taylor Lai (Year 9) and Atticus Dewe (Year 10) were awarded first, second and third prizes respectively in our own Gareth Evans Essay Competition.
Gareth Evans was also commemorated on April 30 th of this year, when friends, academic colleagues, students and teachers gathered to hear Professor Ian Phillips (OA) celebrate his life and work in the newly-named Evans Room (formerly the Old Library). Evans, in his short life, was able to combine a sharp curiosity with a technical mastery of philosophical logic. More broadly, he deployed ‘discursive methods of analysis and argument, critical
discontent, and an imaginative compa rison of possibilities’ – all characteristic of philosophy at its best. 1 I hope that readers will agree that the essays in this volume display the same virtues. Certainly, there is something compelling about their range and intensity.
References
Goff, P. (2019) Galileo’s Error . Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness . London (2023) Why? The Purpose of the Universe . Oxford Williams, B. (1985) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy . London
1 Williams 1985: 4.
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