The Berggruen Institute, a multidisciplinary international think tank dedicated to “exploring the ideas we need for our changing world,” last year launched an essay competition with two $25,000 prizes. It is running the competition again this year, but has now doubled the purse.
The Berggruen Institute may be best known for its annual $1 million prize for philosophy and culture, first awarded in 2016 to Charles Taylor.
The relatively new essay competition, according to the Institute, poses “fundamental philosophical questions of significance for both contemporary life and for the future” and “seeks to stimulate new thinking and innovative concepts while embracing cross-cultural perspectives across fields, disciplines, and geographies.”
The competition aims to award two $50,000 prizes: one for an essay written in English and one for an essay written in Chinese (though the awards may be split among multiple winners, as they were last year).
This is one of the largest philosophy-related essay competition prizes I’m aware of. Other essay competitions with sizable prizes include the Nine Dots Prize ($100,000), the APA/Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Prize ($10,000), the APA’s Alvin Plantinga Prize ($10,000), the various Philosophical Excellence Prizes from the Marc Sanders Foundation ($5000), and the brand new Hinternet Essay Prize Contest ($10,000).
Here’s how the Berggruen Institute describes its competition:
The inspiration for the competition originates from the role essays have played in the past, including the essay contest held by the Académie de Dijon. In 1750, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s essay Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, also known as The First Discourse, won and notably marked the onset of his prominence as a profoundly influential thinker. Similarly, our competition aspires to create a platform for groundbreaking ideas and intellectual innovation.
We are inviting essays that follow in the tradition of renowned thinkers such as Rousseau, Michel de Montaigne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Submissions should present novel ideas and be clearly argued in compelling ways for intellectually serious readers. We are not seeking peer-reviewed academic work.
The topic for the 2025 contest, which is open for submissions through the end of July, is consciousness:
The nature of consciousness has enthralled philosophers for millennia. More recently, modern scientific approaches that seek to illuminate physical aspects of consciousness engender as many questions as they do answers. We seek original essays that offer fresh perspectives on these fundamental questions.
We welcome essays from all traditions and disciplines. Your claim may or may not draw from established research on the subject, but must demonstrate creativity and be defended by strong argument. Unless you are proposing your own theory of consciousness, your essay should demonstrate knowledge of established theories of consciousness that might reflect on, but by no means be limited to, the following themes:
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- Origin of consciousness
- Materiality of consciousness
- Emergence of consciousness
- Non-human consciousness (including machines)
- Manifestation of consciousness
- Threshold of consciousness
- Consciousness in relation to life
- Experience of consciousness
- Evolution of consciousness
- Consciousness across cosmologies
You can learn more about the essay competition, including its rules and submissions requirements, here.
This stipulation strikes me as both bizarre and intellectually vicious. If “original thoughts” from AI were able to get within striking distance of a $50,000 prize for world-class philosophical innovation, the days of philosophy as a profession would be effectively over. In such a world, “intellectual integrity,” with respect to AI, would be a moralistic relic of an obsolete paradigm of scholarship.
On the other hand, if the notion that chatGPT, with its generic prose and underwhelming creative abilities, could give anyone an unfair advantage in this level of competition is actually ludicrous (and it is), then this requirement — “We don’t want anything even slightly polluted by the touch of AI” — is only crippling world-class scholars who might want to use a powerful research tool, by treating them like lazy undergrads who can’t be trusted not to type “write me an essay about Cartesian skepticism” into a prompt box.
This sort of essay contest claims to be about “pushing forward the horizons of knowledge” on some grand humanistic scale. If that were the case, why would its judges worry about such petty grievances as whether the paradigm-shifting idea at the top of the submission pile came from someone who asked chatGPT for comments on a draft, or who used Deep Research for a footnote check? (Or, in theory, if the idea came from the AI itself after being prompted in a sufficiently insightful way!). Is it because we’re worried we’re all going to be replaced by robots and want to rule them out of the guild by norms and fiat? Are we circling the wagons against technological change that could (read: will) disrupt the field? Are we just holding our essentialist noses at the idea of philosophically productive intercognition with an LLM?
Would anyone here like to defend a general scholarly norm against philosophers “using AI” to help them with anything but basic grammar and spellchecking?