The winner of the 2025 Marc Sanders Prize in Epistemology is Errol Lord (University of Pennsylvania).

Professor Lord was awarded the prize for “Aestheticizing Epistemology”.

Here’s the abstract of the paper:

Aesthetic value is central to epistemic normativity. That is a startling sentence to the vanishingly small number of people who can fully understand it. In this paper, I defend it. The basic theoretical details are relatively simple. The domain of epistemic normativity is at least partly determined by the nature of the rational competitions it governs. And the nature of these competitions is determined by the nature of their competitors. This paper is about two of these competitions. First, the doxastic competition, crucially featuring involving belief and disbelief. Second, the noetic competition, whose aim is understanding.

In both competitions, one of the competitors is suspension of judgment. Sometimes the epistemic permits, forbids, or requires suspension of judgment. In the doxastic competition, sometimes we are required to suspend judgment rather than believe or disbelieve; in the noetic competition, sometimes we are required to suspend rather than adopt a conception (the noetic analogue of belief). Thus, to fully understand epistemic normativity, we need to understand the nature of suspension of judgment.

At least one form of suspension of judgment is inquisitive. To use Jane Friedman’s phrase, when you suspend judgment about whether p in an inquisitive way, you put p on your agenda; you are disposed to answer the questions <whether p?>. Now we can get to beauty. Following Plato, I will argue that a certain (purified) sort of passionate love–eros–is this sort of inquiring state of mind. Beauty is the proper object of eros; thus, beauty is central to the epistemology of suspension of judgment.

The competition is sponsored by the Marc Sanders Foundation and administered by Tamar Szabó Gendler (Yale). The prize is $5000 and publication of the paper in Oxford Studies in Epistemology.

Of the paper, the judges wrote:

Veritists try to understand epistemic norms by appeal to the value of true belief, or the value of true belief relevant to our practical goals. Such projects have come under various sorts of compelling attack in recent years (including from Dandelet, Berker, Schafer, and many others). In response to the perceived failures of such projects, many epistemologists have tried to follow the lead of venerable philosophers such as Kant and ground epistemic norms in the value of understanding. But what is the value of understanding, and why are we driven to pursue it? These questions are addressed directly, and the answers offered in terms of aesthetic value are both surprising and compelling.  We expect that this profoundly interesting paper will spark an enormous amount of interest in epistemology over the coming years.

You can read the full paper here and learn more about the prize, including its past winners, here.