The Principality Prize

©Philippe Fitte

Philippe Descola is an anthropologist, former Chair of Natural Anthropology at the Collège de France and Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). He wrote a thesis on ethnology supervised by Claude Lévi-Strauss and, in the late 1970s, visited the upper Amazon to study the Achuar, a Jivaroan people. In 1996, he was awarded the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)’s gold medal for his work on customs and knowledge of nature in tribal societies.

His research focuses on the diversity of ontologies as a range of ways of identifying human societies, as well as the provisional resolution of the logical problems they pose through the use of images. In 2010, he organised an exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly entitled La Fabrique des images (The Image Factory). In 2021, his book Les Formes du visible (The Forms of the Visible) offered a comparative study of the various types of figuration. He has recently published Le Sport est-il un jeu ? (Sport: Is It a Game?) with Éditions Robert Laffont.

The Prince Pierre Foundation and the founding members of the Philosophical Encounters of Monaco are jointly responsible for awarding the Principality Prize on an annual basis to an author for their entire body of philosophical work, honouring a life of philosophical writing and an outstanding body of work which has opened up new paths in the field of philosophy and introduced alternative approaches in science, politics, theology, history, anthropology, ethics or psychoanalysis.

The winner of the Principality Prize is invited to give a lecture the year following their award. 

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