The Berggruen Institute, a think tank oriented around cross-cultural and philosophical approaches to big questions about how to “best support flourishing relations between humans, technology, and the planet” and known for its $1 million “Prize for Philosophy and Culture,” has announced the inaugural winners of its new essay prize.
Launched this past March, the prize competition sought essays “that follow in the tradition of renowned thinkers such as Rousseau, Michel de Montaigne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson” and that “present novel ideas and be clearly argued in compelling ways for intellectually serious readers.”
The contest accepts submissions in English or Chinese, with a winner (or winners) of the $25,000 prize selected from each language. The winning articles are published in the institute’s magazines, Noema (English) and Cuiling (Chinese).
The theme for this year’s competition was “planetarity”, and two essays in English and two in Chinese were selected.
The authors and their winning essays are:
- Adam Frank – The Coming Second Copernican Revolution
- Pamela Swanigan – It’s Time to Give Up Hope For A Better Climate & Get Heroic
- Yichao Lin – 行星机制及其概念开显 [Planetary Mechanism and its Conceptual Manifestation]
- Yingjin Xu– 儒家视域中的行星级数字化生活——一种基于小数据主义的解决思路 [How to make Confucianism Digitalized on a Planetary Scale?—a small-dataism-based proposal]
Each will receive $12,500, and will be honored at an award ceremony in November as part of the Planetary Summit the Berggruen Institute is hosting in Venice, Italy.
Swanigan’s essay on ‘grasping the nettle of truth’ seems to have required some, shall we say, robust corrections.