The British Society for the History of Philosophy and its journal, The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, have announced the latest winners of its prizes.

The British Journal for the History of Philosophy awarded its 2025 Rogers Prize—its annual prize for the best article it publishes—to Jari Kaukua (University of Jyväskylä) for his paper, “Future contingency and God’s knowledge of particulars in Avicenna“.

Here’s the abstract of his article:

Avicenna’s discussion of future contingent propositions is sometimes considered to entail metaphysical indeterminism. In this paper, I argue that his logical analysis of future contingent statements is best understood in terms of the epistemic modality of those statements, which has no consequences for modal metaphysics. This interpretation is corroborated by hitherto neglected material concerning the question of God’s knowledge of particulars. In the Taʿlīqāt, Avicenna argues that God knows particulars by knowing their complete causes, and when contrasted with the human knowledge of particulars, this epistemically superior access shows that the contingency of statements about future particulars is not due to the modal properties of real particulars but to the nature of human access to them.

The winner of the Rogers Prize receives £1,000. The prize was established in 2012 in honour of John Rogers, the founding editor of the journal.

The journal awarded its Beaney Prize—its prize for the best contribution (published by the journal over the past year) to widening the philosophical canon—to Aminah Hasan-Birdwell (Emory University), for her paper, “Ottobah Cugoano on chattel slavery and the moral limitations of ius gentium“.

Here’s the abstract of her article:

This article considers Ottobah Cugoano’s philosophical response to the moral and legal contradictions of the practice of human trafficking in his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787). It analyses Cugoano’s critique of the origins of slavery in general and the practices of ancient slavery, from which seventeenth-century proslavery advocates drew political, theological, and moral justifications of the African slave trade. According to Cugoano’s analysis, there is a necessary moral dependency of the laws of civilization (positive law) on natural law. This distinction has significant philosophical and ethical ramifications that extend beyond the debate over abolition in Cugoano’s time, specifically ramifications for conceptions of slavery in the early modern tradition of natural law theory.

The winner of the Beaney Prize receives £1,000. The prize was established in 2021 in honour of Mike Beaney, Editor of the journal from 2011 to 2021.

The British Society for the History of Philosophy has awarded its Best Graduate Essay Prize for 2025 to Eric Sheng (University of Oxford) for his paper, “Locke’s Epistemic Individualism Revisited: Observation and the Domain of Testimony”.

The runner-up for the prize is Darcy Forster (University of Sydney) for his paper, “Two Accounts of Intellectual Intuition in Schelling’s Early Philosophy”.

The prize of £1000 is awarded annually to the writer of an essay that makes a significant contribution to the history of philosophy. The competition is open to all graduate students, anywhere in the world, studying any subject.

You can learn more about the prizes and see lists of their past winners here.