Manon Garcia is receiving the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize in acknowledgment of her impressive academic profile. The DFG praises her contributions to philosophical academia and, in particular, her dissertation “Consenting to One’s Submission: A Philosophical Problem.” Part of her dissertation was published separately in her 2021 monograph We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives. It has since been translated into several languages, including German, Italian, Spanish, and Chinese. Her second book, The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex, was published in English in 2023 to great acclaim and has also been widely translated. It was selected as one of the fifteen best university-published books of 2023 by the New Statesman.

“What does it mean to be free – to make free choices and act freely? When and why do people choose to give up their freedom? And how does the distinction between women and men play into this? Manon Garcia addresses these fundamental questions from a new perspective within the field of practical philosophy. In her doctoral thesis, she authored one of the most important works on the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, offering an original feminist view: she interprets women’s submission not only as external oppression but also as a conscious decision – made out of habit or even desire. Garcia also examines questions of consent in the context of sexual activity. Her research shows that rape is far more common than public discourse often acknowledges. How can this be – and what does it reveal about our society? This means that Manon Garcia’s philosophical work is of outstanding social and political relevance,” said the DFG’s Joint Committee regarding its decision to include Garcia among the prizewinners.

Manon Garcia was born in France in 1985. She studied at the École Normale Supérieure and received her PhD in philosophy from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She held positions at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and Yale University before accepting a tenure track position as a junior professor at Freie Universität Berlin’s Institute of Philosophy, where she has been researching and teaching since 2022. Her primary research focus is on political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and moral philosophy. She also carries out work on twentieth-century French philosophy and the philosophy of social sciences, especially economics. She is a principal investigator in the project “Sexual Agency and the Ethics of Erotic Experience,” funded by the DFG, and in the research training group (GRK) 2638 “Normativity, Critique, and Change,” based at Freie Universität Berlin.