Speakers
Daniele Bertini
University of Rome 2, Tor Vergata
The Experiential Path Towards Being Religious Peers
I received my degree from the University of Pisa (2000), and my Ph.D from the University of Parma (2006). I have worked at a private research institution from 2012 to 2016, i.e. Fondazione Campostrini, Verona, and I'm now based at the University of Rome 2, Tor Vergata. I'm an analytic philosopher of religion, but I have some interests also in continental philosophy and history of religions. I work within an empiricist framework. My research activity concerns the defence of a descriptive and experiential approach to epistemology, the defence of heteronomy in Metaethics, the defence of religious pluralism, and topics from the Christian theological tradition, e.g. The Argument from Design, The Trinity, Free Will and Determinism.
Akeel Bilgrami
Columbia University, New York
Arguing religious ideals towards a humane politics
I received my degree from the University of Pisa (2000), and my Ph.D from the University of Parma (2006). I have worked at a private research institution from 2012 to 2016, i.e. Fondazione Campostrini, Verona, and I'm now based at the University of Rome 2, Tor Vergata. I'm an analytic philosopher of religion, but I have some interests also in continental philosophy and history of religions. I work within an empiricist framework. My research activity concerns the defence of a descriptive and experiential approach to epistemology, the defence of heteronomy in Metaethics, the defence of religious pluralism, and topics from the Christian theological tradition, e.g. The Argument from Design, The Trinity, Free Will and Determinism.
Paolo Costa
Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Being Religiously Unmusical: What Does it Mean? And Does it Matter?
I received my degree from the University of Pisa (2000), and my Ph.D from the University of Parma (2006). I have worked at a private research institution from 2012 to 2016, i.e. Fondazione Campostrini, Verona, and I'm now based at the University of Rome 2, Tor Vergata. I'm an analytic philosopher of religion, but I have some interests also in continental philosophy and history of religions. I work within an empiricist framework. My research activity concerns the defence of a descriptive and experiential approach to epistemology, the defence of heteronomy in Metaethics, the defence of religious pluralism, and topics from the Christian theological tradition, e.g. The Argument from Design, The Trinity, Free Will and Determinism.
Katherine Dormandy
Universität Innsbruck
Religious Disagreement as an Aid to Religious Truth
Katherine Dormandy is a Lise Meitner fellow at the University of Innsbruck. She is working on a monograph on religious epistemology that takes account of the impact of bias on religious beliefs, and (in part because of this impact) on the epistemic benefits of religious disagreement. She received a DPhil in philosophy from Oxford University and has taught at the Humboldt University of Berlin as well as at Oxford and Innsbruck, and participated in Saint Louis University’s Intellectual Humility Project.
Fiona Ellis
Heythrop College, University of London
Desire, Divine Hiddenness, and Atheism
Reader in Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London, and Director of its Centre for Philosophy of Religion. She defends a form of theistic naturalism in her 2014 book God, Value, and Nature (OUP), and much of her current work has involved spelling out the implications of this position.
She is currently editing a collection of essays New Models of Religious Understanding (OUP 2017) which grew out of a Templeton funded project she directed. She is also co-directing a project on religious experience and desire for which she has a non-residential fellowship at the University of Notre Dame.
Richard Feldman
University of Rochester
Religious Disagreements: Real and Apparent
Dean of the College and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester. As Dean of the College, I oversee all aspects of undergraduate education, both curricular and co-curricilar, for all undergraduates within Arts, Sciences and Engineering. I’ve been on the faculty at Rochester since 1975. My work has been primarily in epistemology. I’ve written two textbooks, Reason and Argument and Epistemology; I’ve co-authored, with Earl Conee, one book, Evidentialism, edited a couple of collections, including Disagreement (with Ted Warfield), and numerous articles.
Rachel JonkerUniversity of Notre Dame
PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. She works in ethics and has particular interests in moral disagreement, ethical relativism and universalism, pluralism and political liberalism, philosophy of law, Christian-Muslim dialogue, and women in Islam.
Geert Keil
Humboldt University Berlin
Geert Keil is Professor of Philosophy at Humboldt-Universität Berlin. Born in 1963, he studied philosophy, linguistics, German literature and educational science at the Universities of Bochum and Hamburg. In 1991, he received his Ph. D. from the University of Hamburg with a dissertation on philosophical naturalism. From 1992 to 1999 he was Assistant Professor at Humboldt-Universität Berlin. In 1999 he received his Habilitation (second dissertation) with a book on causation and agency. Awarded with a Feodor Lynen scholarship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a Heisenberg scholarship of the German Research Foundation (DFG), he was a visiting scholar at the Universities of Trondheim (Norway), Stanford (USA) and Basel (Switzerland). From 2005 to 2010 he held a chair in theoretical philosophy at RWTH Aachen University. He is the author of Kritik des Naturalismus (1993), Handeln und Verursachen (2000, second ed. 2015), Willensfreiheit (2007, second ed. 2013), Quine (2002, second ed. 2011), and the co-editor of twelve anthologies, including Naturalismus (2000), Fifty Years of Quine’s ›Two Dogmas‹ (2003), Phänomenologie und Sprachanalyse (2005), and Vagueness and Ontology (2013).
Winfried Löffler
University of Innsbruck
Reasons, Commitment and Disagreement in Religious
Associate professor at the University of Innsbruck (Department of Christian Philosophy). His current work concentrates on logic, philosophy of science, and especially philosophy of religion. In the latter field, his research concerns questions such as the following: Can religious convictions lay claim to being a sort of explanation for certain features of our world? Can arguments in support of religious convictions in some way be compared with scientific explanations (in the more recent conceptions of scientific explanation; spelled out in the current debate)?
Can standards from contemporary argumentation theory be applied to arguments in the sphere of religions and world-views? Löffler is author of Einführung in die Religionsphilosophie (2006, 2nd , revised edition 2013), Einführung in die Logik (2008) and over 150 scholarly contributions to journals, collected volumes, handbooks, and encyclopedias.
Joonas Pennanen
University of Jyväskylä
Essentially Contested Concepts and Mutual Recognition
PhD student at University of Jyväskylä. He is writing his doctoral dissertation (funded by Kone Foundation), on W.B. Gallie’s essentially contested concepts, its reception, and the nature of endless, intractable disagreements. His broad interests include political philosophy and ethics, the particular emphasis being on the question of how we should react to opposing and conflicting moral and political beliefs and actions while having respect for those who do indeed disagree with us. Joonas Pennanen is a member of the research group Philosophy and Politics of Recognition (led by Onni Hirvonen, and funded by Finnish Cultural Foundation).
Sami Pihlström
University of Helsinki
Since 2014, he is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki. He received his PhD in theoretical philosophy from the University of Helsinki in 1996. He was previously Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä (2006-2014) and the Director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2009-2015). He is currently Vice-Chair of the Research Council for Culture and Society at the Academy of Finland (2016-2018) as well as (since 2016) the President of the Philosophical Society of Finland. He is a member of the Academia Europaea and the Institut International de Philosophie (I.I.P.). He is in charge of the research group focusing on contemporary philosophy of religion within the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence, "Reason and Religious Recognition" (PI Risto Saarinen, University of Helsinki, 2014-2019). He has published widely on pragmatism, realism, metaphysics, ethics, philosophical anthropology, and philosophy of religion. His recent books include Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God (Fordham UP, 2013), Taking Evil Seriously (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Death and Finitude (Lexington, 2016), and Kantian Antitheodicy: Philosophical and Literary Varieties (with Sari Kivistö, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
John Pittard
Yale University
Rationalist Resistance to Disagreement-Motivated Religious Skepticism
Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Yale Divinity School, with a secondary appointment in Yale’s philosophy department. Much of his current work concerns the rational significance of disagreement with informed and intelligent interlocutors; other areas of research include the problem of evil and skepticism. Prof. Pittard’s publications include “Evil and God’s Toxin Puzzle” (Noûs), “Disagreement, Reliability, and Resilience” (Synthese), “Resolute Conciliationism” (The Philosophical Quarterly), “Religious Disagreement” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy), and “Metanormative Contextualism and Normative Uncertainty” (co-authored with Alex Worsnip, in Mind).
Ralf Poscher
Albert-Ludwigs- University of Freiburg
Prof. Dr. Ralf Poscher is director of the Institute for Philosophy of Law at Albert-Ludwigs- University of Freiburg. He is managing director of the Centre for Security and Society of the University of Freiburg and of the Network of Excellence for the Law of Civil Security in Europe (KORSE). His areas of research cover national security law, fundamental rights and legal theory. Recent writings in English include The Moral and Legal Risks of Interventions: Comment, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 170(1), p. 100-104, 2014; Surveillance and Data Protection in the Conflict between European and American Legal Cultures, together with Russell Miller, in: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 9.12.2013; and Terrorism and the Constitution. Looking at the German Case, in: Dissent, No. 1/2009, p. 13-18. He received a doctorate and habilitated at Humboldt-University of Berlin.
Boris Rähme
Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Religious Claims, Arguments, and Disagreements
Boris Rähme (Dr. phil., Freie Universität Berlin) is post-doc researcher at the Center for Religious Studies, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Trento). His main research interests are in the fields of argumentation theory, social epistemology, philosophy of religion, and theories of truth. He has published numerous articles in journals, book-chapters, and a monograph on epistemic theories of truth: Wahrheit, Begründbrakeit und Fallibilität, Ontos: Heusenstamm 2010.
Christoph Schamberger Humboldt University Berlin
Member of the research group Deep Disagreements at Humboldt-University of Berlin where he is concerned with deep disagreement that arises in political and ideological controversies. He has published on Logic, Argumentation Theory and Metaphilosophy.
Marco Ventura
Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Marco Ventura is full professor (professore ordinario) with tenure at the Department of Law of the University of Siena. After a PhD at the University of Strasbourg he has visited the universities of London (UCL), Oxford, Strasbourg, Brussels (ULB), the Centro de Formação Jurídica e Judiciária of Macau, the Indian Law Institute in Delhi, the University of Cape Town, Al-Akhawayn University in Morocco and the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at Brigham Young University. He was a professor (hoogleraar) at the Faculty of Canon Law of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven from October 2012 to September 2015. From 2013 to 2015 he visited Vietnam as an expert in the dialogue between the European Union and the Vietnamese Committee on Religious Affairs. He is a member of the European Consortium for Church and State Research and of the Centre for Droit, Religion, Entreprise et Societé at the University of Strasbourg and CNRS. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Ecclesiastical Law Journal (Cambridge University Press). His subjects include law and religion, canon law, church and state relationships, comparative religious laws, religious freedom, bioethics and biolaw. Ventura is the author of the following books: Procréer hors la loi (Strasbourg: Cerdic-publications, 1994), Pena e penitenza nel diritto canonico postconciliare (Napoli: ESI, 1996), La laicità dell’Unione europea (Torino: Giappichelli, 2001), Religion and Law in Italy (Alphen aan den Rijn: Wolters Kluwer, 2013), Creduli e credenti. Il declino di Stato e Chiesa come questione di fede (Torino: Einaudi, 2014) and From Your Gods to Our Gods. A History of Religion in British, Indian and South African Courts Eugene (Cascade Books).