Philosophy instructor receives best paper award

Nils-Hennes Stear, an incoming instructor in the Department of Philosophy in the College of Liberal Arts, recently received the 2019 Australasian Journal of Philosophy Best Paper Award for his paper, “Meriting a response: The paradox of seductive artworks.” Stear, whose work focuses on philosophical aesthetics, joins a department already internationally recognized as among the world’s best in aesthetics. His paper is the first paper in aesthetics ever to win the Australasian Journal of Philosophy Best Paper Award.

"The Australasian Journal of Philosophy is a top ten generalist journal with very low acceptance rates. Given the extremely high quality of the work published there, winning the annual Best Paper Award is a scholarly achievement that would mark the high point of most philosophical careers,” said James Shelley, department chair. “That Nils has won such an award at the outset of his career shows how promising that career is.”

Stear works in aesthetics, ethics and their intersection. The main focus of his work currently is on the question of whether an artwork's ethical value determines its aesthetic value and how. He is currently writing a book that seeks to answer this question titled Beyond Moralism, which is under contract with Oxford University Press.

In addition, Stear has published on fiction, the imagination, feminist sexual ethics and our engagement with sports and competitive games. He is currently co-writing papers on the ethics of adopting oppressive attitudes in imagination and on the nature of aesthetic pleasure.

Stear received his doctorate from the University of Michigan.

Full details about his paper can be found at https://aap.org.au/AJP-Best-Paper-Award/.