Ryan Doran Wins ASA/Danto Prize

Ryan Doran (University of Barcelona/University of Cambridge) has won the 2024 Arthur Danto/American Society for Aesthetics Prize for his article "Ugliness Is in the Gut of the Beholder" (Ergo 9:5, 2022). John Dyck (Auburn University) received Honorable Mention for his article "There are no Purely Aesthetic Obligations" (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 102(4): 592-612, 2021) 

The Danto/ASA Prize is awarded to a member of the APA and the ASA for the best paper in the field of aesthetics, broadly understood. In addition, a symposium in honor of the recipient of the prize is held at an APA Eastern Division meeting. This prize is in honor of the late Arthur Danto, a past president of the APA Eastern Division.

Ryan P. Doran is a María Zambrano Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona and a Visiting Researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, where he is Co-Director of “Higher Values: Aesthetic Experiences, Transcendence, and Prosociality,” a three-year project funded by the Templeton Religion Trust. He is also a senior member of the LOGOS research group and the Barcelona Institute for Analytic Philosophy (BIAP). He did his PhD jointly at the Universities of Sheffield and Antwerp, and was the winner of the 2013 British Society of Aesthetics Doctoral Scholarship. He completed the majority of his postdoctoral work at the University of Cambridge. Most of his research sits at the intersection of philosophical aesthetics, moral philosophy and the philosophy of mind, and brings together the traditional tools of philosophy with the experimental methods of the cognitive sciences. He was a previous editor of the British Society of Aesthetics’ journal Debates in Aesthetics.

From the selection committee: Ryan Doran’s essay “Ugliness Is in the Gut of the Beholder” is an original, wide-ranging, and penetrating analysis of our concept of ugliness that utilizes an impressive range of the empirical literature on emotions. As Doran argues, ugliness is grounded in our disposition to feel disgusted. A fortiori, the aesthetics of ugliness raises some serious ethical questions as the emotion of disgust is also responsible for our tendency to dehumanize and exclude others from the human community. Doran’s article exemplifies the virtues of an interdisciplinary approach to philosophical aesthetics. It is for this very reason that he is a very deserving recipient of this year’s Arthur Danto/American Society for Aesthetics prize.

The next Danto/ASA Prize will be awarded in 2026, with a submission deadline of January 20, 2025, for articles published in 2023 and 2024.

Past winners:

2022: Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, "Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law," Art Journal 79:4 (2020), 92-113.

2020: Keren Gorodeisky and Eric Marcus, "Aesthetic Rationality," Journal of Philosophy 115:3 (2018), 113-140.

2018: Kenneth Walden, "Art and Moral Revolution," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73:3 (Summer 2015), 283-295.