Stanley Corngold, professor of German and comparative literature, and Gilbert Harman, the Stuart Professor of Philosophy, have received Princeton's Behrman Award for distinguished achievement in the humanities. They were honored at a May 2 dinner.
Corngold, a Princeton faculty member since 1966, has published widely on modern German writers and thinkers but is best known for his translations and writing on the work of Franz Kafka. He is the author of "The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory" (1986; second edition, 1994); "Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form" (1988); "Borrowed Lives" (with Irene Giersing, 1991); "Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature" (1998) and "Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka" (2004). His translations of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" (1972, 1996) have sold 2 million copies, and he recently translated and edited a Norton Critical Edition of "Kafka's Selected Stories."
Corngold is a faculty associate in Princeton's Program in Law and Public Affairs. His most recent book, "Franz Kafka: The Office Writings" (with Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner, 2008), brings together -- for the first time in English -- the German writer's most interesting professional writings, composed during his years as a high-ranking lawyer with the largest Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in the Czech lands of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Corngold shows how Kafka's legal writings prefigure many of the themes and strategies of the novels and stories he wrote at night.
Harman, who joined the Princeton faculty in 1963, is known for his work in a number of areas in philosophy, including the philosophy of language, the theory of knowledge, ethics and cognitive science. He is legendary for his great versatility, having contributed to most areas of contemporary philosophy over the course of his career. His books include "Change in View: Principles of Reasoning" (1986), "Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity" (with Judith Jarvis Thomson, 1996), "Reasoning, Meaning and Mind" (1999), "Explaining Value and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy" (2000) and "Reliable Reasoning: Induction and Statistical Learning Theory" (with Sanjeev Kulkarni, 2007).
In 2005 Harman was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize, given to a leading philosopher whose work has advanced the field of cognitive science. He has long approached philosophical issues with an interest in their interaction with other academic fields. He teaches a course in epistemology and learning theory with Kulkarni, professor of electrical engineering, one on the philosophy and psychology of rationality with Philip Johnson-Laird and Eldar Shafir, professors of psychology, and another on semantics with Edwin Williams, professor of linguistics.
Bestowed annually, the Behrman Award was established in 1975 by a gift from the late Howard Behrman, a physician and book collector.
