The first winner is--yawn--Charles Taylor, who has previously received the Kluge Prize, the Templeton Prize, and the Kyoto Prize, among others. (This isn't as peculiar a choice as the first Kluge Prize, however, far from it!) But, seriously, was it necessary to give one million dollars to an already rich apologist for Catholicism who has a somewhat uneven reputation among professional philosophers (see, e.g., here)? (Taylor was independently wealthy, even before his other millions in prizes.) The prize is supposed to recognize "a thinker whose ideas are of broad significance for shaping human self-understanding and the advancement of humanity. It seeks to recognize and encourage philosophy in the ancient sense of the love of wisdom and in the 18th Century sense of intellectual inquiry into all the basic questions of human knowledge. It rewards thinkers whose ideas are intellectually profound but also able to inform practical and public life across the range of world civilizations." The funder, Nicolas Berggruen, is quoted as observing that, "Ideas have had a greater impact on human history than anything else. We still live in a world that was shaped by Socrates, Confucius, Jesus Christ, Mohamed and Karl Marx, to name a few." That is a very weird list of names for a philosophy prize, though the inclusion of two religious figures whose influence is due not to their philosophical contributions but mass movements (and, if Nietzsche is right, certain kinds of psychological malaise) is perhaps telling, and may help explain why the first awardee is best-known as a nuanced opponent of naturalistic modernity and an apologist for religion. And what is the evidence that Taylor has had any influence on "practical and public life across the range of world civilizations"? He has played an important role in the public life of Canada, to be sure, but elsewhere?
All that being said, the choice of Taylor is, of course, perfectly reasonable if boring. From his important work on Hegel in the 1970s to his most recent book, Taylor has maintained an impressive record of substantial, scholarly productivity. But perhaps in the future they will choose someone with similar breadth, but greater philosophical depth, who has also been influential in the public sphere (say, Philip Pettit?). And perhaps it's important to remember that many philosophical contributions of lasting importance to "practical and public life" were not recognized as such at the time. (And some, like Marx's, were not even distinctively philosophical!)
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