Kaidi Pan and Henry Straughan win teaching prize!

Kaidi Pan is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department. His interests range across philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, and theoretical and practical reason, alongside the history of early modern and analytic philosophy, with an openness to other traditions. At the center of his work are two simple but stubborn questions: what it is for “things”—whatever they are—to make sense at all, and how we, as linguistic beings, explain, justify, and make sense of the world in the first place. His current research takes up “why”-questions, using formal semantic tools to investigate the structure of explanation. Known in seminar rooms for always having one more “why” to press, he treats that impulse not as a habit to outgrow but as a method to refine—an attempt to understand explanation by turning the question back on itself, and on the one who keeps asking it.

Henry Straughan is a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Philosophy, working primarily on early modern thought. He is writing a dissertation on the role of harmony in G. W. Leibniz’s metaphysics and ethics. Before joining Yale in 2022, Henry received a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford followed by a BPhil in Philosophy.