The executive committee of the European Society for Aesthetics is happy to announce that the winning essay of the 2022 Fabian Dorsch ESA Essay Prize is “In Defence of Fictional Examples” by Alex Fisher (University of Cambridge). The committee appreciated that the essay provides a new take on a longstanding discussion about the cognitive value of literary fiction whilst also giving many insights regarding the nature of thought experiments and their role in philosophical inquiry. Alex will present the paper on Thursday, June 30th, 2022 at 3 pm (EEST). A longer version of the winning essay will be published in Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics.
The ESA Essay Prize for PhD students and early career researchers was launched in 2017 in memory Fabian Dorsch, a co-founder and the first secretary of the European Society for Aesthetics. Its former winners include Nemesio García-Carril Puy (2021), Jeremy Page (2020), Irene Martínez Marín (2019), Mark Windsor (2018), and Servaas van der Berg (2017).