Prizes

Four prizes: De Brigard's MacArthur, Danks's AI2050, Norton's Lakatos, a lycéens' vote

A Duke philosopher of memory takes a MacArthur Fellowship, a Virginia philosopher of AI a three-year Schmidt Sciences award, a Pittsburgh historian of physics the Lakatos Award for two books on induction, and French sixth-formers choose a book against the culture of the clash. What the four have in common, and what we could not confirm.

Autumn's philosophy prizes: Nussbaum, Vetter and Dixsaut take the season's honours

Four awards fill in the autumn prize map. Martha Nussbaum takes the Library of Congress Kluge Prize; Barbara Vetter the German Research Foundation's Leibniz Prize; Monique Dixsaut the Academie francaise's grand prix de philosophie; and three sixth-formers from Mexico, Bulgaria and Singapore the gold medals at the Warsaw philosophy olympiad.

Michael Sandel, Martha Nussbaum, Plato

Seyla Benhabib awarded the Karl Jaspers Prize for her philosophy and her public voice

Heidelberg University, its Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the city have named Seyla Benhabib the 2026 laureate of the 25,000-euro Karl Jaspers Prize, citing a life's work on justice, rights and migration and a voice raised, in the jury's words, 'against the evil spirit of an age'. The ceremony is on 29 April 2027.

Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Hannah Arendt

Tractatus Prize goes to Maria-Sibylla Lotter for a cool look at the victim as self-image

The Philosophicum Lech has given its 25,000-euro Tractatus essay prize to the Bochum philosopher Maria-Sibylla Lotter for Opfer. Über Verwundbarkeit als Selbstbild, a study of how 'victim' became the most authoritative word in public life. The jury praised a 'crystal-clear' book; the ceremony is at Lech am Arlberg on 25 September.

Four Fields Medals, one machine proof and the question of what the prize is for

Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman and Hong Wang received the 2026 Fields Medals in Philadelphia on 23 July. Seven weeks later an AI swarm settled a version of Navier–Stokes and Tristan Buckmaster said the mathematician who built the method deserves a medal. A prize for promise now has to say whose promise it means.

Jean Nicod Prize 2026 goes to Elisabeth Camp, philosopher of the unsaid

The Rutgers philosopher takes the field's most watched award in philosophy of mind, and will give the Nicod Lectures in Paris this autumn. Her subject is the part of communication that is never actually asserted: metaphor, sarcasm, slurs, insinuation, and the perspectives that organise what we notice.

David Chalmers, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Elena Esposito, Elisabeth Camp

Templeton Prize goes to the palaeontologist who thinks minds are inevitable

Simon Conway Morris, whose Burgess Shale work supplied the evidence for Stephen Jay Gould's 'Wonderful Life', has taken the 2026 Templeton Prize for arguing that Gould read those fossils backwards. His thesis — that evolution converges on eyes, flight and intelligence — carries a philosophical bill that his critics say he has not paid.

Eric Schwitzgebel, Jeremy Pober, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Simon Conway Morris

Balzan Prize for Elena Esposito, who stopped asking whether machines think

The 2026 Balzan Prize for the social science of digital technology goes to a sociologist trained by Niklas Luhmann. Her claim is that the seventy-six-year argument about machine understanding has been aimed at the wrong target, and that the question worth asking about language models is a social one.

Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers, Elena Esposito

The Al-Rodhan Prize 2026 longlist: the question philosophy asks has changed

The Royal Institute of Philosophy has announced the 2026 longlist for its £20,000 interdisciplinary philosophy prize. Six books, drawn from six separate disciplines. Yet all of them ask a single question, and that question gives away philosophy's real agenda in 2026: what exactly is a human being?