Members
Markus Quirin (Speaker) is a professor of personality psychology and motivation at PFH Göttingen as well as a research fellow at Technical University of Munich. In 2017 he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research, which was published in more than 70 peer-reviewed, international journal articles, focuses on personality, motivation, emotion, and volition („self-regulation“), their complex causal interplay, measurement, brain mechanisms and relationships to psychological health.
Godehard Brüntrup is a philosopher and theologian. He is a professor of philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology at Munich School of philosophy in Munich, Germany. He also teaches regularly in the USA (he has held positions at St. Louis University, Fordham University, and the University of Notre Dame, among others). Recently, he was the leader of a large-scale interdisciplinary research project on motivation and human flourishing funded by Templeton.
Farhood Malekzad (M.Sc. in general psychology, Allameh Tabatabai University, Tehran-Iran) investigates implicit traits and dynamic processes of affect, motivation, volition, and how they are linked to personality changes and growth.
Gina Hernández holds a Master’s degree in Cognitive Science (Carleton University, Canada). In 2021, she defended her doctoral dissertation entitled Implicit Measures of Affect for the Study of Daily Stress at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Currently, she conducts research on implicit affectivity, funded by a research grant from the Technical University of Munich.
Buki Fatona. I am undertaking a Doctor of Philosophy in Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. In my research, via the lens of contemporary cognitive neuroscience, I am examining memory systems in antiquity (Aristotle’s) and medieval period (Augustine’s and Aquinas’). I am specifically interested in the relation between remembering the past and future-directed thinking. This thesis nicely brings together my degrees in Microbiology (BSc); Theology (BA); and Epistemology, Ethics, Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science (MSc); it is being supervised by Alister McGrath, the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford.
Benedikt Paul Göcke. Dr. phil, Dr. theol., is Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Philosophy of Science at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. He is also a Research Fellow at the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, University of Oxford, and a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Göcke is author of: A Theory of the Absolute (Macmillan, 2014), Alles in Gott? (Friedrich Pustet, 2012, The Panentheism of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (Peter Lang, 2018), and editor of After Physicalism (Nore Dame, 2012) and The Infinity of God (Notre Dame, 2018), among other. He published articles in The International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Religious Studies, Zygon, Sophia, Faith and Philosophy, TheoLogica, The European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, and Theologie und Philosophie, among others.
Enrico Grube holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. He works at the intersection between philosophical and theological anthropology. In September 2023 he will commence a position as post-doctoral researcher at the FWF-funded project "4E-Cognition in Theological Anthropology" at the University of Innsbruck, Austria."
Aku Visala (Title of Docent in Philosophy of Religion, University of Helsinki) is a researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has held positions at the universities of Oxford (UK), Princeton (USA) and Notre Dame (USA). Visala is the author of a number of books, including Naturalism, Theism and the Cognitive Study of Religion: Religion Explained? (Routledge, 2011), Conversations on Human Nature (Routledge, 2015) and A Philosophy of Free Will (Helsinki University Press, 2018). In addition to composing electronic music and watching bad movies, his interests include depression, cognitive science, and the problem of free will.
Hans Van Eyghen is Assistant professor of philosophy at Tilburg University. He studied at the Catholic University of Leuven and the Free University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on epistemology of religion in dialogue with cognitive (neuroscience). He published 'Arguing from Cognitive Science of Religion' in 2020 and 'Revising Cognitive and Evolutionary Science of Religion' in 2021.
Katherine Dormandy is a Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Christian Philosophy, University of Innsbruck, Austria. She works primarily in epistemology (particularly social epistemology) and moral psychology (especially trust, love, faith, the self), and philosophy of religion. She believes that research in these areas stands to benefit significantly from insights from psychology.
T. Ryan Byerly is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, UK, where he has worked since 2015. His research focuses on virtue theory and philosophy of religion, though in recent years he has begun to publish work in personality psychology and the psychology of religion as well. His recent books include Putting Others First: The Christian Ideal of Others-Centeredness (2019) and Intellectual Dependability: A Virtue Theory of the Epistemic and Educational Ideal (2021), both with Routledge Press. His current book project, under contract with Oxford University Press, is Faith, Flourishing, and Agnosticism.
Ruben Maximilian Schneider. I studied Philosophy and Mathematics in Munich; 2014 PhD in Philosophy on a topic in Analytic Philosophy of Religion and Metaphysics of Free Will. Currently PostDoc at the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences at the University of Augsburg. Previously: Munich School of Philosophy (HFPH), Free University of Berlin, Ruhr University Bochum. My research interests include Analytic Metaphysics, continental criticism of metaphysics, and Philosophical Anthropology. From 2018 to 2019, I was a fellow in the ʽMotivational and Volitional Processes of Human Integrationʼ Project at HFPH Munich. My specific interest is in Personality Systems Interaction Theory (PSI), the phenomenon of conflictual self-infiltration, and the concrete conduct of empirical statistical studies.
Associate Professor Saša Horvat is a philosopher contributing to the intellectual landscape within the Department of Social Sciences and Medical Humanities at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Rijeka, Croatia. Prof. Horvat's portfolio reflects his engagement with diverse philosophical realms, ranging from neurophilosophy and the philosophy of science to the intricate intersections of philosophy with religion, cognitive science, medicine, ethics, autism and artificial intelligence.