The meeting of the award committee was attended by Prof. Dr. Gesa Lindemann, Prof. Dr. Julien Kloeg, Dr. Steffen Kluck, and Prof. Dr. Volker Schürmann, representing the Helmuth Plessner Society, as well as Prof. Dr. Robert Gugutzer, Jürgen Kaube, Prof. Dr. Andreas Brensing, and Head of Cultural Affairs Dr. Hendrik Schmehl.

Jay M. Bernstein has been one of the foremost experts on German-language philosophy in the US for decades. His lectures on Kant and Hegel in New York are legendary. He has written standard works on classical and romantic aesthetics in Germany, on the literary philosophy of Georg Lukács's theory of romanticism to Derrida's deconstruction, on the rediscovery of ethics in Frankfurt Critical Theory, and on the philosophy and, in particular, aesthetics of Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno in its diverse references to the development of music in the 20th century. A particular focus of Bernstein's aesthetic interest is the visual arts in modern painting as a contrast to the depictions of the body in advertising. His own aesthetic focus on the transformation of Kant and Hegel has consistently led him to expose the idealistic traditions to their hiatus in physical existence here and now, thus breaking dialectically through forms of materiality.

In the last decade, Bernstein has therefore also increasingly engaged with Helmuth Plessner's philosophical anthropology. In Bernstein's book Torture and Dignity (University of Chicago Press 2015), he works very convincingly with Plessner's distinction between being-body and having-body for persons. Since Plessner does not split persons dualistically into atomized self-consciousnesses, but situates them in interpersonal relations with the shared world and in the body-flesh difference, Bernstein is able to develop a very broad and differentiated understanding of dignity to be respected and of psychologically and physically violent violations of this dignity through torture. This essay has met with great interest in practical ethics and political philosophy.

In recent years, Bernstein has rendered outstanding services to the reception and dissemination of Plessner's philosophical anthropology in the Anglo-Saxon world. In 2019, the English translation of Plessner's Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (The Levels of the Organic and Man) was published with a detailed introduction by Jay Bernstein. In it, he highlights the originality of Plessner's work, especially for the current US discussion on bio- and natural philosophy with regard to the life sciences (Fordham University Press). In 2020, the second edition of Plessner's Laughing and Crying was also published in English (Northwestern University Press), for the first time with a new foreword by Jay M. Bernstein. In it, he highlights Plessner's originality in his philosophically integrative treatment of the limits of personal conduct for the current US discussion. This allows for a meaningful critique of both the boundlessness of self-realization and the conformism of going along with the crowd.

Jay M. Bernstein is a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City, which became famous for taking in many emigrants who had to flee Nazi Germany, and where Helmuth Plessner was the first holder of the Theodor Heuss Professorship in 1962/63. He taught for 25 years at the University of Essex in England and at Vanderbilt University, where he was W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy. Bernstein received his doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 1975; his dissertation dealt with the relationship between physics and biology in Kant's critical philosophy.

Jay M. Bernstein is currently completing a book entitled "Earth Justice." It deals with the ethical challenge of climate change and the significance of the Anthropocene for understanding human life on planet Earth. In it, he argues that humans must not only be understood as part of living nature, as in Plessner's philosophical anthropology, but that they must now also be morally and politically classified within the ecological community of Earth's inhabitants: "The Anthropocene is an ethical event; climate change has caused serious damage to the ecological integrity of the living Earth, and we are now responsible for its future well-being, restoration, and sustainability. We can only take responsibility for and towards other people, including future generations, if we apply principles of 'earth justice', including an international ecocide convention that would have the same status as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide."

On Friday, September 4, the prize will be presented at a ceremony in the town hall. In addition to the award ceremony, a lecture by the prize winner and a scientific conference on the prize winner's work are planned.