Speakers
Mark Alfano
Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study
Distinguished Guest Fellow
Mark Alfano earned his doctorate in 2011 at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. In August 2011 he joined the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, where he is finishing revisions of Character as Moral Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Mark’s research focuses on moral psychology broadly construed to include normative ethics, metaethics, psychological investigations of moral judgment and emotion, experimental philosophy, and the nascent field of moral technology. He has published articles on all of these topics in such venues as Philosophical Quarterly, The Monist, The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, and Erkenntnis.
Jessica Berry
Georgia State University
Associate Professor
Jessica Berry has been teaching Philosophy at Georgia State University since 2006, before which she was an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her area of expertise is in late 18th– to early 20th-century German philosophy and in ancient Greek Philosophy. She has taught courses on Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, Kant, Heidegger, and Aristotle, as well as on the philosophy of art. Her forthcoming book, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition brings together and expands upon her work in publications, such as Philosophical Topics, The Journal of the History of Ideas, and International Studies in Philosophy. In 2008, Berry received the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. She holds a B.A. from the University of Puget Sound and completed her Ph.D. at The University of Texas at Austin.
Maudemarie Clark
University of California (Riverside)
Professor of Philosophy
Maudemari Clark joined the faculty of UCR after serving as George Carleton Jr. Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Colgate University. She also taught at Columbia University for ten years. Clark’s specialty is in 19thcentury German philosophy and she focuses on the philosophy of Nietzsche, on whom she has published many works, including: “Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy” and a co-translation, with Alan Swensen, of “Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality.” She is currently co-authoring a book entitled Nietasche’s Magnificent Tension of the Spirit. Clark completed her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ken Gemes
Birkbeck College, University of London
Professor of Philosophy
Ken Gemes joined the faculty of Birkbeck in 2000 after teaching for ten years at Yale University. His teaching and research interests range from technical issues concerning logical content and confirmation to Nietzsche’s account of how philosophy is merely the last manifestation of the ascetic ideal. His recent publications include “Freud and Nietasche on Sublimation” in Journal of Nietasche Studies and “We Remain of Necessity Stranger to Ourselves: The Key Message of Nietasche’s Genealogy” in Acampora, Christa Davis, ed. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays. Gemes completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh.
Dominic Griffiths
University of Auckland
Faculty of Arts
Ph.D. Student of Philosophy
Dominic Griffiths recently submitted his Ph.D., titled ‘A Raid on the Inarticulate’: Exploring Authenticity, Ereignis and Dwelling in the work of Martin Heidegger and T.S. Eliot, at the University of Auckland. He plans further investigation into the work of Heidegger and Vattimo, as well as exploring existentialism through film. He recently published “The Politics of Dwelling: Being White / Being South African” in Africa Today and “Daring to disturb the universe: Heidegger’s authenticity and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in Literator. He completed his MA at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, where he also taught for two years.
Charles Guignon
University of South Florida
Professor of Philosophy
Charles Guignon joined the USF Philosophy Department in 2001 after teaching at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Vermont. His main interests are Continental Philosophy, philosophical study of psychology and psychotherapy theories, and recent thought on the self and related matters. Guignon has received numerous accolades, and in 2006 he was appointed Fulbright Senior Specialist in U.S. culture. Guignon has authored two books, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge and On Being Authentic, and has co-authored several others, including The Grand Inquisitor and The Good Life. Currently, Guignon is working on a volume for the “Arguments of the Philosophers” series on Heidegger, and Existentialism: An Introduction for Polity Press. He completed both his B.A. and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley.
Kathleen Higgins
University of Texas (Austin)
Professor of Philosophy
Kathleen Higgins focuses her research on continental philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of music. She has written Comic Relief: Nietzsche’s Gay Science, What Nietzsche Really Said (with Robert Solomon), A Passion for Wisdom, A Short History of Philosophy (with Robert Solomon), The Music of Our Lives, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, which Choicenamed an outstanding academic book of 1988-1989. Higgins has edited or co-edited several others works on topics such as German Idealism, aesthetics, ethics, erotic love, and non-Western philosophy. She has been a Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University Philosophy Department and Canberra School of Music. Higgins completed her Ph.D. at Yale University.
Christoph Jamme
University of Lüneburg
Professor Doctor of Philosophy
Christoph Jamme taught at the Friedrich-Schiller-University until 1997. At that time he joined the faculty of the University of Lüneburg, where he served as the Dean of Humanities from 2001-2005. In 2002 Jamme became the Chairman of the Institute for Cultural Theory. He has been a research associate at the Hegel Archives at the Ruhr-University of Bochum and a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced study (NIAS). His publications include God has robe: Limites and perspectives of philosophical theories of myth-present. Jamme completed his Ph.D. at the Ruhr-University Bochum.
Win Chiat Lee
Wake Forest University
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Win-chiat Lee is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He did his undergraduate work at Cornell and graduate work at Princeton, both in philosophy. His research interest has migrated over the years from ethics and political philosophy to philosophy of law, including philosophy of international criminal law. His latest publications are on the subject of universal jurisdiction. Besides philosophy of law, Lee teaches regularly courses in social and political philosophy and global justice. He served as the chair of the Philosophy Department at Wake Forest from 1993 to 2001.
Brian Leiter
University of Chicago Law School
Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence
Director, Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values
Brian Leiter became a faculty member at the Law School in 2008, where he founded the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin for twelve years, during which time he served as a Visiting Professor to several other universities, including Yale and Oxford. His teaching and research interests are in general jurisprudence, moral and political philosophy, and the law of evidence. He has published numerous books and is presently writing Why Tolerate Religion?Leiter has been invited to give named lectures at universities throughout the world, and he is the founding editor of the Routledge Philosophers book series and of Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Law. Leiter holds an A.B. from Princeton University and completed both his J.D. and Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Peter Loptson
University of Guelph
Professor of Philosophy
Peter Loptson has been a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph since 1998. Most of his recent publications have been in metaphysics, or on the philosophies of Leibniz or Hume. He has broad interests in intellectual and cultural history. Most recent book is a second edition of Reality: Fundamental Topics in Metaphysics (2010). Forthcoming are an edition of Leibniz’s metaphysical writings, and articles on Hume. He completed his B.A. at York University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh.
Jeff Malpas
University of Tasmania
Professor of Philosophy
Jeff Malpas has served as professor at The University of Tasmania since 1999, before which he taught philosophy at Murdoch University. The concept of place is integral to his research focus, and in 2010 he published The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies. Malpas’ current projects include Making Ethics Work: A new Model for Business and Professional Ethics; Ethos and Topos: On the Ethics and Politics of Place; and Triangulating Davidson. He was recently named the Humboldt Research Fellow, and in 2007 he received the Australian Research Council International Linkage Award with Karsten Theirl for “Genealogy and Topology: A Constellational Comparison of Nietzsche and Heidegger.” Malpas holds a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Aukland and completed his Ph.D. at the Australian National University.
Greg Moore
University of St. Andrews
Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy
Greg Moore, who will join the Department of History at Georgia State University in August 2012, previously taught at the University of St Andrews and the University of Wales Aberystwyth. He works primarily on Nietzsche, Herder, and the philosophical reception of Darwinism. He is the author of Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge University Press, 2002) as well as the translator of Herder’s Selected Writings on Aesthetics (Princeton University Press, 2006) and Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
John Richardson
New York University
Professor or Philosophy and Bioethics
John Richardson works primarily in 19th century and 20thcentury Continental philosophy, particularly on Nietasche and Heidegger. He has a strong secondary interest in ancient philosophy, especially in Aristotle. Recently he has focused on issues concerning teleology in these philosophers, and has explored relations with recent philosophy of biology and evolutionary theory. Richardson has authored numerous works including Existential Epistemology; A Heieggerian Critique of the Cartesian Project, Nietzsche’s System, and Nietasche’s New Darwinism. He is also a co-editor of Nietzsche (2001) in the series Oxford Readings in Philosophy. Richardson holds a B.A. from both Harvard and Oxford and completed his Ph.D. UC Berkeley.
Ivan Soll
University of Wisconsin (Madison)
Emeritus Faculty
Department of Philosophy
Ivan Soll taught as a professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison until his retirement in 2011. His research concerns the philosophies of Nietzsche Schopenhauer and questions about the nature and value of aesthetic experience. Soll has given nearly 130 talks, domestically and abroad, and has authored over 50 scholarly articles. His recent publications include “Attitudes Toward Life: the Existential Project of Nietzsche’s Philosophy,” in International Studies in Philosophy, and “On the Death of the Author: A Premature, Postmodern Postmortem,” in The Dialogue, Yearbook of Philosophical Hermeneutics. Soll holds an A.B. from Princeton University which he received before pursuing graduate studies at Harvard University, the University of Munich, and Princeton University.
Hans Sluga
University of California (Berkeley)
William and Trudy Ausfahl Professor of Philosophy
Hans Sluga joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley in 1970, before which he taught Philosophy at the University of London. In 2009, Sluga became the William and Trudy Ausfahl Professor of Philosophy. He has served as a Visiting Professor to universities around the globe, including the University of Hamburg in Germany and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Among his teaching and writing interests include the philosophies of Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault. He has published several works, such as the book Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany and an article entitled The Pluralism of the Political: From Carl Schmitt to Hannah Arendt. Sluga was educated at the University of Bonn and the University of Munich before completing his Ph.D. at Oxford.
Stefan Sorgner
Institut für Geschichte und Ethik der Medizin
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität
Professor of Philosophy
Stefan Lorenz Sorgner specializes in Nietzsche, the philosophy of music, bioethics, and meta-, post-and transhumanism, and ethics of emerging technologies. In recent years, he taught at the Universities of Jena (Germany), Erfurt (Germany) and Klagenfurt (Austria). Sorgner is a member of several editorial boards and recently published “Nietzsche and Germany” in Philosophy Now. Sorgner received his BA from the King’s College/University of London, his MA from the University of Durham, and his Dr.Phil. at the University of Jena.
Christine Swanton
University of Auckland
Faculty of Arts
Senior Lecturer
Christine Swanton teaches in the Philosophy Department University of Auckland New Zealand. She is currently working on the virtue ethics of Hume and Nietzsche. Her book on virtue ethics, Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View was published with Oxford University Press 2003, paper 2005.
Iain Thomson
University of New Mexico
Professor and Graduate Director of Philosophy
Iain Thomson is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of New Mexico. A scholar of 19th and 20th century European philosophy, he is the author of numerous essays and two books: Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge UP, 2005); and Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge UP, 2011). His philosophical work has been translated into seven languages. A recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, Thomson is currently writing a philosophical biography of Martin Heidegger. He holds a BA from UC Berkeley and completed his MA and PhD at UC San Diego.
David Weinstein
Wake Forest University
Professor of Political Science
David Weinstein joined the faculty of WFU in 1989. Weinstein was a postdoctoral fellow at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has held visiting fellowships and scholarships at Oxford University and Tulane University. In 2009, he was a Fulbright Fellow at the Simon Dubnow-Institut, University of Leipzig. He has published two monographs, Equal Freedom and Utility and Utilitarianism and the New Liberalism, and he is the co-editor of The New Liberalism and John Stuart Mill and the Art of Life. Weinstein holds a B.A. from The Colorado College, M.A. from the University of Connecticut, and his Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University.
John Whitmire
Western Carolina University
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion
John F. Whitmire focuses his research on the ways the philosophical anthropologies apparent in prominent philosophers’ theoretical works are broadened, deepened, or problematized in their autobiographical writings and literature. His essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Derrida have appeared in journals such as Philosophy Today, Sartre Studies International, The Pluralist, and Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo. Additionally, he has published collaborative work on themes of exile, citizenship, and alienation. In 2011, Whitmire won both the WCU Excellence in Teaching Liberal Studies Award and the Outstanding Achievement in Teaching Service Learning Courses. He holds a B.A. from Wake Forest University and Ph.D. from Villanova University.
Mark Wrathall
University of California (Riverside)
Professor of Philosophy
Professor Wrathall’s research focuses on the existential and phenomenological traditions in philosophy. He is particularly interested in phenomenological accounts of perception, language, art, religion, and law. Wrathall is the author of How to Read Heidegger, and has edited several collections of essays, including A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism and Religion after Metaphysics. Recent articles draw on the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Nietzsche, and Pascal. He has taught courses over the past few years on phenomenology, existentialism, perception, art, and the philosophy of law. Wrathall is currently working on a book-length manuscript on Heidegger’s later work, and editing The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time.
Julian Young
Wake Forest University
Kenan Professor of Humanities
Julian Young holds a B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge University, an M.A. from Wayne State University, and a Ph. D. from the University of Pittsburgh. His main interests are 19th and 20th century German philosophy (especially, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger), the meaning of life, philosophy and opera (especially Wagner), and tragedy. His ten books and many articles reflect these interests. His most recent book is Friedrich Nietzsche: a Philosophical Biography which won the Association of American Publishers 2010 PROSE award for philosophy.
Guenter Zoeller
University of Munich
Professor
Günter Zöller studied philosophy at the University of Bonn, the École normale supérieure, Paris and Brown University, receiving his M.A. and Dr. phil. degrees from Bonn. He taught for sixteen years in the U.S.A., before assuming his current position at the University of Munich in 1999. He has been a Visiting Professor at Princeton University, Emory University and Seoul National University and will be the Tang I-Chun Visiting Professor of Philosophy at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in the fall of 2012. His work, published in many books and over 250 articles in numerous languages worldwide, focuses on Kant, German idealism, the philosophy of art and political philosophy. He is the author of Objective Reference in Kant(de Gruyter, 1984), Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy (Cambridge, 1998) and Critical Spirit. Knowing and Acting in Kant, Fichte and Nietzsche(Matica Hrvatska, 2012) and the (co-)editor of Fichte’s Practical Philosophy(Rodopi, 2006), Beginning By Transferring: Imperial Figurations Around 1800 (Fink, 2010) and The State As a Means to an End. Fichte on Freedom, Right and Law(Nomos, 2011).