Professor Dr. Carola Dietze, Professor Dr. Marcus Düwell, Professor Dr. Joachim Fischer, Professor Dr. Volker Schürmann, the members nominated by the city, Professor Dr. Tilman Allert, Jürgen Kaube, Professor Dr. Eva Waller, as well as Lord Mayor Gert-Uwe Mende and Head of Cultural Affairs Axel Imholz took part in the meeting of the Prize Board of Trustees on an equal footing for the Helmuth Plessner Society.

Gérard Raulet, born in August 1949, studied at the École normale supérieure Lettres et sciences humaines in Saint-Cloud from 1969, is a qualified German teacher (agrégé d'allemand 1973), received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) in 1981 and qualified as a professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1985, where he taught as a professor of German history of ideas until 2020. In 2006, he published the standard French work on German philosophy in the 20th century "La philosophie allemande depuis 1945".

Gérard Raulet has explored and discussed the entire history of 20th century theory from the perspective of the productive drafts of the 1920s (Benjamin, Bloch, Marcuse, Scheler, Plessner) through the 1960s (Habermas, Gadamer, Blumenberg, Jonas) to the present day of the 21st century. In 2006, he published the standard French work on German philosophy in the 20th century "La philosophie allemande depuis 1945" (Paris). What is remarkable about Raulet's intellectual career is that he, who initially began working in close association with critical theory (Habermas, Honneth), made a lasting turn towards philosophical anthropology in Paris at the end of the 1990s - in the wake of the German renaissance of Scheler and Plessner - without ever losing sight of his origins. In the aforementioned book "La philosophie allemande", he had already devoted a relevant chapter to "L'anthropologie philosophique et la psychoanalyse", in which he also introduced Plessner to the French public in outline for the first time.

Raulet further opened the door to the French reception of Plessner by organizing a trilateral research project (French-Italian-German) on L'anthropologie philosophique: ses origines et son avenir - philosophical anthropology: origins - future, which lasted several years from 2000 onwards and, in addition to the few explicit references, primarily explored the implicit philosophical and anthropological references between German and French philosophy.

Overall, relevant parallels were discovered in the emerging French-German Plessner discussion, not only to Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, but also to "French philosophical anthropology in the last third of the 20th century" (Raulet). In Canguilhem and Deleuze, for example, "the connection between living bodies (and bodies) and their environments is thought of in a non-reductionist, non-idealistic and non-mechanistic way" (Anderson/Ebke/Nigrelli/Pagan 2022) and this approach also holds true for a complex, critical concept of human nature. At the same time, Raulet initiated a book series "Philosophical Anthropology - Themes and Positions", in which he also published his studies under the title "The Critical Potential of Philosophical Anthropology" (2020), which is indicative of his intention.

In Gérard Raulet's favor is the fact that he played a decisive role in ensuring that philosophical anthropology, and Plessner's contribution in particular, was discussed in France and that this ultimately contributed to a public impact that could hardly have been hoped for in our neighboring country, alongside the impact of Martin Heidegger's writings. This led to a broad public impact of the approaches and ideas in Europe, especially in the Romance world.

On September 4, 2023, the prize was presented at a ceremony in the town hall. In addition to the award ceremony, there was a lecture by the prizewinner, a scientific conference on the prizewinner's work, a city walk in Plessner's footsteps and a discussion with Wiesbaden schoolchildren.