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

Prizes are usually about the winner.

Longlists say something else: what the field takes to be important.

The Royal Institute of Philosophy has announced the 2026 longlist for the Nayef Al-Rodhan International Interdisciplinary Philosophy Prize. The award is in its fourth year and worth £20,000.

Six books are on the list. Read together, the six draw a map of philosophy in 2026.

The longlist#

Blaise Agüera y Arcas — What Is Intelligence?: Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds (MIT Press). What artificial intelligence has taught us about evolution, computation and mind. The author is a computer scientist; the question is philosophical.

Frances Egan — Deflating Mental Representation (MIT Press). An intervention in one of the most technical arguments in the philosophy of mind: does the concept of mental representation rest on ground as firm as cognitive science supposes? Egan's answer is deflationary — we may go on using the language of representation, but without loading a heavy metaphysics onto it.

Gareth S. Owen — Psychiatry and Human Nature (Cambridge University Press). What kind of knowledge does psychiatry produce? What assumptions about human nature does the concept of mental disorder carry with it?

Andrea Pinotti — At the Threshold of the Image: From Narcissus to Virtual Reality (Zone Books). From Narcissus to virtual reality: what does it mean to step “inside” an image? How did the threshold between image and reality grow so thin?

Dan Turello — Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans (Columbia University Press). A counter-thesis to the pessimism that dominates the criticism of technology.

Christine Webb — The Arrogant Ape: And A New Way To See Humanity (Little, Brown). Against human exceptionalism: how far can our habit of placing ourselves above the other animals be defended scientifically?

The common axis#

These six books come from six separate disciplines: computer science, cognitive science, psychiatry, visual culture, media theory, primatology.

And all six take hold of the same question from a different side:

What exactly is a human being?

Agüera y Arcas asks: is intelligence peculiar to us? Egan asks: is the mind a thing that represents? Owen asks: what is a normal mind? Pinotti asks: where is the difference between an experience and the image of it? Turello asks: must technology diminish us? Webb asks: why do we suppose we are at the centre?

The chair of the judges, Constantine Sandis (Lex Academic, Hertfordshire), said that all six books cross disciplinary boundaries to advance the understanding of human behaviour.

The panel also includes Francesca Cacucci (UCL), Christina Easton (Birmingham), Edward Harcourt (Oxford), Carey Jewitt (UCL), Lambros Malafouris (Oxford) and Barry Smith (the Institute of Philosophy, London).

Last year's winner: philosophy that reads like a legal text#

The 2025 prize went to Jonathan Birch for The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI (Oxford University Press).

That book is the clearest illustration of what the prize is looking for.

Birch's question is this: what should we do when we cannot be certain whether a creature is sentient?

The book defines sentience as “the capacity for experience that carries a value” — pain and pleasure, for instance — and then moves to the problem of deciding under uncertainty: patients with disorders of consciousness, foetuses, invertebrates such as octopuses and insects, and the artificial intelligence systems of the future.

Birch's approach offers no theory of consciousness. It builds instead a framework of precaution: where does the threshold of evidence lie? Which indicators should be taken seriously? And, most important, who should decide?

That third question is what makes the book unusual. Birch argues that decisions of this kind cannot be left to experts and should be taken through participatory procedures such as citizens' panels.

A book on the philosophy of consciousness thus turns into a book about democratic decision-making.

Why we are dwelling on this#

Three of the stories we have followed this week converge on this prize.

Birch's framework of precaution is the direct answer to our report on the emails artificial intelligence agents sent to consciousness researchers: how are we to behave when we do not know what stands before us?

The same framework sits at the same table as the scepticism of Eric Schwitzgebel's AI and Consciousness and as Keeling and Street's Emerging Questions in AI Welfare.

And the conference on the philosophy of animal welfare to be held at Duke University on 20-21 November is the same question seen from the animal side.

A note#

Nayef Al-Rodhan, whose name the prize carries, is a philosopher and neuroscientist; he runs the geopolitics programme at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and has written a manifesto of his own for interdisciplinary philosophy.

The prize's entry categories reflect that programme: the philosophy of the future of humanity; the philosophy of frontier risks and disruptive technologies; the philosophy of global governance and intercultural understanding; the philosophy of human nature and scientific innovation; the philosophy of interdisciplinary methods.

The categories are arguable — “interdisciplinarity” can reward breadth where depth is wanted.

But looking at the books on the list, the worry seems misplaced, at least this year.

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The Royal Institute of Philosophy was founded in 1925 and received its royal charter in 1947. The shortlist and the winner will be announced in the coming months.