Kitcher Wins Frontiers of Knowledge Prize
Philip Kitcher, professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University, has been named the winner of the Frontiers of Knowledge Prize in the Humanities by the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) Foundation.
The €400,000 (approximately $438,000) prize was awarded to Professor Kitcher for his “trailblazing work [which] addresses a broad spectrum of the core questions of our time.”
According to the prize announcement, prize committee chair John Dupré (Exeter) says:
What stands out in Kitcher’s work is its enormous breadth, the way its spans the philosophy of science (to improve the practice of scientific research), ethics, politics and education, interrelating all these domains in order to improve society and further its progress.
The Frontiers of Knowledge Prizes are awarded annually in the humanities and several other areas.
The full prize announcement is here. A list of previous winners is here.
Since Kitcher was interested in the incentives and organisation of academic labour, I wonder: what’s the point of giving massive cash prizes to retired and presumably already-wealthy academics? It seems like the opposite of the sort of efficient organisation that Kitcher might argue for. Otherwise, surely a deserving winner.
The earliest work in this tradition included focus on the conferring of prestige, including posthumous legacy within science and in society at large. So a positive case would presumably involve something like the following conjecture: the awarding of large sums at the end of careers is an efficient means of ensuring certain individuals end up with a prestigious legacy, in science and in society. If so, actually giving the massive cash prizes establishes that the incentive is in place for young legacy-oriented researchers to organize into their preferred research programs, etc.