The Board of Ludvig Holberg’s Memorial Fund will award the Holberg International Memorial Prize for 2005 to Professor Jürgen Habermas. The prize is awarded annually for outstanding scholarly work in the fields of the arts and humanities, social science, law and theology. It is worth NOK 4. 5 million (approx. € 575,000/$700,000).
The Board of the Ludvig Holberg Memorial Fund award the prize on the basis of the recommendation of an academic committee composed of outstanding researchers from the above mentioned academic fields.
Excerpt from the Holberg Prize Academic Committee’s recommendation:
“Jürgen Habermas has developed ground-breaking theories of discourse and communicative action which have resulted in new perspectives on law and democracy…His research is thematically wide-ranging and has had exceptional interdisciplinary impact. Habermas has significantly contributed to the understanding of rationality, ethics, legitimation, critical public discussion, modernity, the post-national society and European integration…Lately, Habermas’ work has included studying fundamental problems in ethics and philosophy…Habermas has had an extraordinary international influence in a great number of disciplines.”
Jürgen Habermas has been a dominant figure in the field of theoretical Social Science for more than 40 years. His research encompasses a broad diversity of different themes and has had considerable multidisciplinary impact. He has also been an active and influential participant in general public debates, says Professor Jan Fridthjof Bernt, president of the Board of the Ludvig Holberg Memorial Fund.
Jürgen Habermas, (b. 1929), is Professor Emeritus at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main in Germany.
The Holberg Prize will be officially awarded on 30 November 2005 at a formal ceremony in Håkon’s Hall in Bergen.
The Board of the Ludvig Holberg Memorial Fund also awards the Nils Klim Prize to younger Nordic researchers in the same academic fields as the Holberg Prize. The prize is worth NOK 250,000 (approx. €32,000/$39,000). The Board has chosen to award the Nils Klim Prize for 2005 to Doctor Artium Dag Trygve Truslew Haug.
The Board of the Ludvig Holberg Memorial Fund award the prize on the basis of the recommendation of an academic committee composed of outstanding Nordic researchers from the above mentioned academic fields. Excerpt from Nils Klim Prize Academic Committee’s recommendation:
“Dag Trygve Truslew Haug is an unusually sharp, versatile and talented linguist, who has attained a prominent position in the field of classical linguistics at the age of only 29. His fields of research include both traditional historical linguistics and modern linguistics applied to classical languages...Haug has also demonstrated that he is a talented educator and communicator, not least in connection with his lecturing activities and a series of radio programmes.“
The Nils Klim Prize will be awarded on 28 November 2005 in Bergen.