The Journal of the History of Ideas awards the Selma V. Forkosch Prize for the best article published in the journal each year.
The winner of the JHI’s Selma V. Forkosch Prize for the best article published in 2024 is Germaine A. Hoston for “Neo-Confucianism and the Development of German Idealism” (volume 85, no. 2, pp. 257–87).
The judging committee provides this statement about the article:
With multilingual erudition and judicious scholarship, Germaine A. Hoston convincingly shows that, despite Kant’s and Hegel’s apparent Sinophobia, Neo-Confucianism shaped German Idealism in essential ways. The conduit for the transmission of these ideas was Leibniz. His engagement with the writings of Jesuit missionaries to China, whose works were the subject of lively controversy in early-modern Europe, was an inspiration for those who followed in his wake. Hoston shows how particular variants of Neo-Confucian thought—most notably that of Zhu Xi (1130-1200)—were critical to the slow absorption of Neo-Confucian ideas into German Idealism. Hoston’s article is an exemplary piece of global and comparative intellectual history. It is a worthy winner of the Forkosch article prize for 2024.
Germaine A. Hoston is a professor of Political Science at University of California San Diego.
Congratulations to Dr. Hoston! Read the article here.
