2025 Lebowitz Prize Awarded to Philosophers Dominic McIver Lopes and Samantha Matherne 

WASHINGTON, DC – May 15, 2025 – The American Philosophical Association (APA) and the Phi Beta Kappa Society (ΦBK) are pleased to announce that Dr. Dominic McIver Lopes, University of British Columbia, and Dr. Samantha Matherne, Harvard University, have won the 2025 Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution. Awarded annually by ΦBK in conjunction with the APA, this prize recognizes outstanding achievement in the field of philosophy. Each winner will be awarded an honorarium of $25,000.

The Lebowitz Prize was established in 2012 by a generous bequest from Eve Lewellis Lebowitz in honor of her late husband, Martin R. Lebowitz, a distinguished philosophical critic. Lebowitz Prize winners must be two philosophers who hold contrasting views on a chosen topic of current interest in philosophy. 

Dominic McIver Lopes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and University Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia. With support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the Killam Trusts, and the Gulbenkian Foundation, he has shed light on the value of images, the role of technology in the arts, and the nature of art. His recent work models the social conditions that underlie many forms of aesthetic and artistic agency, and his 2024 book Aesthetic Injustice highlights connections between social inequality and harms to people as aesthetic agents. He is now writing on a cross-cultural history of his field, Pluralism and Its Discontents.

Samantha Matherne is a Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She works on aesthetics and is particularly animated by questions concerning imagination, creativity, and community. She approaches these questions through a broadly historical lens that she draws from Immanuel Kant, philosophers in the post-Kantian tradition, and novelists like Jane Austen. In her most recent book, Seeing More: Kant’s Theory of Imagination, she explores the pervasive role that imagination plays in our lives. She has also written Cassirer for the Routledge Philosophers Series, co-authored The Geography of Taste with Dominic McIver Lopes, Mohan Matthen, and Bence Nanay, and edited the first English translation of the neglected work of the German philosopher, Edith Landmann-Kalischer: Edith Landmann-Kalischer: Essays on Art, Aesthetics, and Value. 

Professors Lopes and Matherne’s topic for the 2025 Lebowitz Prize is "What Beauty Promises." They will present their views and engage in a dialogue at an annual Lebowitz symposium, held during an APA divisional meeting, and in an episode of the podcast Key Conversations with Phi Beta Kappa. 

Nominations and applications for the 2026 Lebowitz Prize will open in early fall 2025; the deadline is November 30, 2025. Please click here for more information.