Panos Paris wins Finnish Society for Aesthetics’ “Article of the Year” award
28 January 2026
Dr Panos Paris been awarded the Finnish Society for Aesthetics’ Article of the Year 2025 prize for his paper “On Beauty and Wellformedness”, published in The British Journal of Aesthetics.
The Society’s annual awards recognise work that sparks wider discussion about art, beauty and aesthetic value, alongside a dedicated prize for outstanding research.
In their citation, the Society highlights Dr Paris’s argument that well-formedness is a condition for beauty, and praises the paper’s clear, ambitious framework for thinking about how beauty shows up in different kinds of experience.
The article proposes a three-part account of well-formedness — abstract, categorial and functional — and brings classic questions in aesthetic theory into conversation with contemporary philosophy and empirical research, including findings from cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology.
The Finnish Society for Aesthetics says the paper helps unite debates about beauty across art, nature, science and morality, while still taking the distinctiveness of those domains seriously.
The winner was chosen by the Society’s Chair, Dr Ossi Naukkarinen, and Treasurer, Dr Alpo Väkevä.
“I am both humbled and delighted to receive such a prestigious award. This award is especially meaningful for me because it recognises the importance of an article that I myself believed in, but which I really struggled to publish. I am therefore truly grateful to the Finnish Society for Aesthetics for finding value and ambition in my work, and for giving me hope to continue working without undue concern over disciplinary trends or boundaries.”
Read “On Beauty and Wellformedness” in The British Journal of Aesthetics (Vol. 65, No. 2, pp. 257–282).