Recipients

Hier fehlt noch die englische Übersetzung des Gewinners

As third award recipient was selected 2020 Onora O’Neill, philosopher, United Kingdom, Member of the House of Lords, born August 1941. Due to the Corona-pandemic the award ceremony could only be held in March 2021.
Onora O’Neill is one of the great figures of international contemporary philosophy. After her PhD with John Rawls, she became famous as an eminent Kant scholar. Constructions of Reason from 1989 is certainly one of the most important books for understanding practical philosophy from recent decades. The book aims to demonstrate the genuine political character of practical reason and to emphasize the importance of public use of reason. O’Neill locates questions of ethics within a broader anthropological and political frame; thus, in her influential book, Towards Justice and Virtue from 1996, she warns against procedural reductions of political philosophy (which is implicitly critical of her teacher John Rawls). In Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics from 2002, she emphasizes the importance of political trust, countering mere proceduralism. In recent years she primarily worked, academically and politically, on the dangers for democracy in the digital age.
The political character of philosophy is not only important for the academic work of Onora O’Neill, she is equally an eminent political person as member of the House of Lords and as former president of the Royal Academy. She served on various committees and has received numerous awards. In recent years, she has investigated concertedly the situation of politics in the digital age; for example, in her capacity as co-chair of the ALLEA working group, Truth, Trust and Expertise. There are few Anglo-Saxon philosophers of comparable prominence who are both internationally visible, as is O’Neill, and also steeped within the German philosophical tradition. As she is fluent in German, she has been very present in Germany.
With Onora O’Neill one of the most important contemporary philosophical voices is honoured. Even if she has not worked expressly on Plessner’s views, her work has many links to the work of Helmuth Plessner, as well her Kant scholarship and her systematic oeuvre. O’Neill’s view of ethics is characterised by deep awareness of the methodical challenges of ethical judgment. Thus, ethical considerations are never possible without abstraction and universalisation and yet they also require the concrete embodiment of the subject of ethical judgment; this conjunction is pre-eminently important to ethics. The tension between the unfathomability of human beings on the one hand and the necessity of justification and legislation on the other, which is so eminently important to Helmuth Plessner, is mirrored in the work of O’Neill. From this follows – among much else – the importance O’Neill emphasizes for trust in human interaction. She sees such trust endangered if one assumes that human interaction could only be ensured and enhanced by codification, supervision, and quality management. She rather emphasizes that joint action is always imperfect and aspects of unfathomability are always connected to human action. For future debates about philosophical anthropology in the tradition of Plessner, the work of Onora O’Neill offers many important, rich connections.

The Press Release of the City of Wiesbaden from March 2020
The Press Release of the City of Wiesbaden from March 2021
Informations of the City of Wiesbaden on the award and the award recipient

The ceremony of the City of Wiesbaden on the occasion of the awarding of the prize took place on 23 March 2021. Due to Corona, the laureate and laudator were connected, and the event was streamed live on Youtube and can be viewed there.

You can find the welcoming address of the Helmuth Plessner Society here
You can find the laudatio of Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Krüger here

The Karlsruhe philosopher Peter Sloterdijk was the second recipient of the Helmuth Plessner Award in 2017.
After an intense discussion of three candidates proposed by the Helmuth Plessner Society, the awards committee decided by a majority on March 3, 2017, to bestow the honor on Peter Sloterdijk. The city of Wiesbaden’s press release explains this choice as follows: “Peter Sloterdijk is one of the most important contemporary German philosophers and cultural theorists. He studied philosophy, history, and German studies in Munich and at the University of Hamburg. His book Critique of Cynical Reason, first published in German by Suhrkamp in 1983, is one of the best-selling philosophical books of the twentieth century. In addition to his extensive publications, Peter Sloterdijk has in the past decades taught philosophy at numerous universities in Germany and abroad.”

Within philosophy and theory circles, Sloterdijk’s work is seen as an original contribution to “philosophical anthropology” and is debated throughout Europe. “Outside of Germany, Sloterdijk is seen as representing the legacy of philosophical anthropology because of his position against Heidegger’s anti-anthropology” (Marco Russo). This “anthropological elucidation” of the conditio humana can already be found in the first, foundational volume of his Spheres trilogy (Sloterdijk’s principal work to date, 1998-2004), which begins with the shared world as the constellation forming the human: the human as “dual being” in the prelinguistic, dialogical, I-thou-relationship between fetus and mother, in the “mother-child space.” In his subsequent essay Menschentreibhaus (“The Human Greenhouse,” 2001), Sloterdijk undertakes a systematic “anthropological elucidation” of the conditio humana—explicitly distancing himself from Darwinism on one side and culturalism on the other.

Sloterdijk elaborates a nexus of “anthropogenetic” mechanisms in the field of life in order to reconstruct the transition from primates to human beings phylo- and ontogenetically: the mechanism of “insulation” of primate groups with the creation of a specific shared world (a social climatic space); the mechanism of “shutting down the body” (Koerperausschaltung) with the development of throwing as a “distancing technology” from nature; the mechanism of “pedomorphosis” or “neoteny” with the prolongation and preservation of infantility in the human form; the mechanism of “transmission,” by means of which linguistic metaphors from the zone of familiarity gradually create “world openness.”
This theory is systematically and methodologically analogous to Plessner’s approach in his great essay Die Frage nach der conditio humana (“The question of the conditio humana,” 1960), in which he modified and reformulated The Levels from 1928 while preserving its essence. Plessner’s aim here is to clarify, in dialogue with biology and especially anthropology, the conditions of the possibility of the human in natural history, in the transition zone from animals: the mechanisms associated with the “human blueprint” of “imitation and reciprocity,” of the “reification” of their own bodies and the “repression” of their drives, of language as the “superelevation of the eye-hand-field,” of the boundary regulation of the “relation between world and environment.” Interesting here is the fact that Sloterdijk develops his constellation analysis of the conditio humana with reference to Paul Alsberg, Louis Bolk, Adolf Portmann, and Dieter Claessens—the same philosophical and anthroposociological network in which Plessner and Scheler were the main protagonists.

“Conferring the Helmuth Plessner Award on Peter Sloterdijk is a great honor for Wiesbaden,” says Rose-Lore Scholz, head of the city’s department of cultural affairs and chair of the awards committee. “With his articles and books Peter Sloterdijk has stimulated numerous debates in Germany and beyond and provided impetus for thought to broad segments of our society.”

The awards ceremony took place on September 4, 2017, Helmuth Plessner’s 125th birthday, in Wiesbaden’s city hall.

Wolfgang Eßbach’s speech in honor of Tomasello, September 4, 2017 (in German).
Acceptance speech of Peter Sloterdijk am 04.09.2017 (gekürzte Fassung im ›Tagesspiegel‹ vom 19.09.2017)

Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, was the first recipient of the first Helmuth Plessner Award.
In Michael Tomasello, the awards committee has chosen to honor a pioneer of philosophical anthropology in the 21st century. In his work, Tomasello makes sophisticated ontogenetic comparisons between the genetically close relatives non-human primates and human beings, with a special focus on human children. In his impressive experimental and interpretative approach, he carries forward the tradition of contrastive comparisons between human beings and animals which also characterized Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology. Specifically, Tomasello analyzes the distinctive character of human ontogenesis on the basis of the human monopoly on the pointing gesture. Humans are the only primates to point things out to each other and to their children, and human children are the only ones to point things out to each other and to adults. According to Tomasello, the strong connection between objectivity and intersubjectivity instituted by the pointing gesture allows for a “shared intentionality,” a unique phenomenon in evolutionary history which forms the basis of all human communication, especially of the use of language, and thus of cooperation. In view of contemporary sociological and philosophical debates concerning the dominance of naturalism, it is important to note that Tomasello regards nature as an enabling structure of the sociocultural world. Tomasello’s view is thus emphatically not a form of determinism, reductionism, or Darwinism.

Joachim Fischer’s speech in honor of Tomasello, September 4, 2014 (in German).