On the occasion of the sixth birthday of hegelpd (2019) we launched the first edition of the hegelpd-book discussion (hegelpd–prize). The prize is meant to award a contribution, which has recently appeared in the field of Hegelian studies, and which offers a great potential for discussion for the research group of classical German philosophy in Padova.

Last year’s prize was granted to Gregory S. Moss’ Hegel’s Foundation Free Metaphysics: The Logic of Singularity (Routledge, 2020).

For this year, we received many noteworthy proposals, which aroused the committee members’ interest. We would like to first of all sincerely thank all the researchers who have submitted their own or others’ contributions.

In communicating this year’s winner, we would like to stress that the hpd-prize is not meant as an award signalling the absolute “best” contribution appeared in the last few years in the field of Hegelian studies – we have no ambition, nor are we in the position, to make any rankings. Rather, the hpd-prize identifies the contribution that best meets the research interests of the hegelpd group.

We are happy to announce that, after careful consideration, the hegelpd research group has decided to award the hegelpd–prize 2023 to Allegra De Laurentiis’ Hegel’s Anthropology: Life, Psyche, and Second Nature (Northwestern University Press, 2021). 

Allegra De Laurentiis will be invited to Padova to present her work and discuss it with the research group members at hegelpd and everyone interested. Further info on this event will follow.

As it has become customary in the last few years, the committee also awards an article with a special mention. This year’s mention goes to Ioannis Trisokkas’ “The Stubbornness of Nature in Art. A Reading of §§556, 558 and 560 of Hegel’s Encyclopedia” (in Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. A Critical Guide, ed. by S. Stein and J. Wretzel, Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Finally, the members of hegelpd decided to confer a honorable mention to Hegel and the Challenge of Spinoza: A Study in German Idealism, 1801-1831 by George di Giovanni (Cambridge University Press, 2021). We see this work as the coronation of a life-long, outstanding research trajectory, which made Di Giovanni’s writings a benchmark in the field of studies on classical German philosophy.