Liz Sato receives JASSO fellowship
The government of Japan, through its Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO) program, offers a competitive $27,000 research fellowship. Much like the Boren, Fulbright, Rhodes, Soros, or Marshall fellowships here in the United States, the JASSO fellowship is designed to support Japanese citizens pursuing graduate-level research in countries around the globe.
Congratulations to MA student Rizu ‘Liz’ Sato, who successfully competed against 463 graduate student applicants in the humanities and social sciences and was lauded with the award for academic year AY25–26.
Liz’s first introduction to philosophy was a course on the history of early modern thinkers, especially the works of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher . More than any other philosopher in that period, Hume laid the philosophical foundations for modern science and epistemology, establishing the doctrine of empiricism and advancing skeptical views about causation and inductive reasoning, religious belief, moral psychology, and the self. Liz was fascinated by Hume’s empirical inquiry into human nature, and her intellectual curiosity led her to major in the subject. Liz completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at International Christian University in Tokyo, where she made the dean’s list four times; along the way, she studied abroad for a semester at UC Berkeley, taking classes in philosophy of mind and psychology.
Liz decided to pursue a Master of Arts degree in the United States, which she believes offers the best education in the world, to gain more skills and background in research. She initiated her MA program here at 91ÖÆƬ³§ in FA24 and immediately began enriching her understanding of the early modern and modern philosophical traditions. With Dr. Jayasekera, she took a graduate seminar on free will in the early modern period and a special topics course on Leibniz; she added a course on the British empiricists from Dr. Nolan; and with Drs. Wright and Banick, she took a class on Kant and a graduate seminar on Hegel’s logic.
Owing in part to this systematic training, Liz was successfully able to apply for a SU25 research assistantship. She will work with Dr. Jayasekera on a project on the moral philosophy of another figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, . Together, they will analyze his Essays on the Active Powers of Man to explore the conception of so-called ‘common sense’, which is a class of intuitive judgments. They also plan to study the role that common sense plays in Reid’s discussion of and arguments for moral liberty and the implications of these ideas for today’s discussion on free will.
The Scottish Enlightenment fomented many interesting debates over sentimentalism and the role of the ‘passions’ in moral theory, and Liz has interests in moral psychology as well. This past SP25, she was awarded travel grants to present a paper on empathy at the West Coast Masters Philosophy Conference, where she argued that perspective-taking is the central feature that distinguishes empathy from other emotions. And she plans to take the seminar on moral psychology this FA25 with Dr. Milam to develop these interests further.
But Liz has always been most deeply intrigued by Hume’s philosophy since the beginning of her journey into academic philosophy. She was invited as a speaker at the SP25 Philosophy Day! Symposium, where she explored whether Hume considers belief in God to be an instance of natural belief or not. In her talk, Liz noted that commentators on Hume have failed to differentiate the criteria for the technical term ‘natural belief’ from what Liz calls ‘mere belief’. On these grounds, she argued that, for Hume, belief in God—not being a prerequisite for mere belief formation—is not natural. As she moves into the next academic year and takes up her JASSO fellowship, Liz plans to explore the assembly of her interests into an MA thesis.
Again, congratulations to Liz on all of these accomplishments and especially on being awarded such a prestigious international fellowship from Japan.
