Participants
Donald Ainslie (University of Toronto) is Associate Professor of Philosophy, with a research interest in Early Modern Philosophy. He has written extensively on Hume's account of the passions, moral philosophy, and philosophy of mind.
Kathleen Akins (Simon Fraser University), Associate Professor of Philosophy, whose research interests are focused on Neurophilosophy, Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. She is the recipient of a McDonnell Foundation grant in Philosophy and the Neurosciences.
Lilli Alanen (Uppsala University), Professor of Philosophy whose interests are currently focused on the intentionality (or representationality) of the passions in early modern philosophy. The author of Descartes’s Concept of Mind, she is also the author of numerous articles on the emotions in the history of philosophy as well as on contemporary accounts of emotions.
Deborah Brown (University of Queensland) is a Senior Lecturer of Philosophy and the author of Descartes and the Passionate Mind as well as numerous articles on medieval and early modern accounts of the passions.
Lyle Crawford (Simon Fraser University) is a PhD student in Philosophy at Simon Fraser University, whose dissertation will concern issues of self in philosophy of mind. He has very broad philosophical interests including contemporary philosophy of emotions.
Dennis Des Chene (Washington University in St. Louis), Professor of Philosophy whose research interests font late Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy. The author of Physiologia, Life’s Form, and Spirits & Clocks, he is currently working on a book on 17th Century accounts of the passions, for which he has received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.
Ian Drummond (University of Toronto) is a PhD Student in the Collaborative Programme in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. He is currently writing a dissertation on John Duns Scotus’s moral psychology.
James Harris (University of St. Andrews), is Lecturer in Philosophy. His research deals with 17th and 18th century British philosophy. Has recently published Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy.
Paul Hoffman (University of California, Riverside), Professor of Philosophy with research interests in late Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy. He has written several influential articles on the theories of the passions of Descartes, Malebranche and Spinoza.
Peter King (University of Toronto) is Professor of Philosophy and Medieval Studies. He has written extensively about medieval philosophy of mind. His publications also include important papers on Aquinas’s theory of emotions and on the potential influence of medieval theories on Descartes’s theory of the passions.
Simo Knuuttila (University of Helsinki), Professor of Theology, is chair of the History of Mind Research Unit at the University of Helsinki. He has published widely on medieval accounts of the emotions. He is the author of Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (OUP 2004).
Henrik Lagerlund (University of Western Ontario), Assistant Professor of Philosophy, works on medieval philosophy of mind and medieval philosophy of language. He has edited various collections including Emotions and Choice from Boethius to Descartes (Kluwer 2002; with Mikko Yrjönsuuri), Mental Representation and Objects of Thought in Medieval Philosophy (Ashgate 2007) and Forming the Mind: The Mind/Body Problem(s) in Late Medieval and Early Modern Thought (Springer 2007).
Calvin Normore (University of California, Los Angeles), Professor of Philosophy, works on medieval philosophy, especially medieval philosophy of action and medieval philosophy of language. He has also published a series of influential papers on medieval philosophy of mind.
Claude Panaccio (Université du Québec à Montréal) holds a Canada Research Chair in Knowledge Theory. He has extensively published on William of Ockham and 13th and 14th century philosophy of mind.
Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado, Boulder), Professor of Philosophy, works currently on a book examining the transition from late medieval philosophy to early modern philosophy. He has published widely on Aquinas, especially on Aquinas’s philosophy of mind.
Katherina Paxman (University of Western Ontario) is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario whose dissertation concerns the shift from talk of passions and sentiments to emotions in 18th century philosophy. She will present part of her dissertation-in-progress.
Jeff Pelletier (Simon Fraser University) is Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science and Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics.
Dominik Perler (Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany) is Professor of Philosophy, with special emphasis on medieval philosophy. He is the author of a series of books on medieval philosophy of mind and cognition. For his academic achievements he was recently awarded the Leibnizpreis, the most important research award in Germany. His current research projects include a book project on emotions in later medieval philosophers.
Martin Pickavé (University of Toronto) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Medieval Studies. His current research concerns medieval theories of emotions.
Michael Rosenthal (University of Washington), Associate Professor of Philosophy, has research interests in medieval Jewish and early modern philosophy. He has published extensively on Spinoza’s philosophy, and in particular on Spinoza’s account of the passions.
Donald Rutherford (University of California, San Diego) is Professor of Philosophy with research interests in Ancient and Early Modern Philosophy. His current research focuses on the role of eudaimonistic ethical theory in the seventeenth century, and in particular on the ways in which Stoic and Epicurean themes are taken up and transformed by such philosophers as Gassendi, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.
Amy Schmitter (University of Alberta), Associate Professor of Philosophy, is currently undertaking research on the notion of representation in 17th Century philosophy. She is author of several articles on Descartes’ account of the passions and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on early modern theories of the passions.
Jonathan Schooler (University of British Columbia) is Canada Research Chair in Social Cognitive Science and Professor of Psychology. His current research interest concerns awareness and meta-awareness (our awareness of our experience) and in particular meta-awareness of emotions. His expertise in contemporary psychology will lend an important perspective to the discussion.
Lisa Shapiro (Simon Fraser University) is Associate Professor of Philosophy. Her research concerns early modern accounts of the passions. She is editor and translator of The Correspondence of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Rene Descartes (Chicago) in which Descartes begins to develop his account of the passions. She is in the process of completing a book on Descartes’s account of the passions as a development of his philosophy of mind and metaphysics.
Alison Simmons (Harvard University) is Professor of Philosophy with research interests in early modern philosophical accounts of sensation. More generally her interests concern contemporary and historical philosophical and psychological accounts of the mind.
Edward G. Slingerland (University of British Columbia) is Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition and Associate Professor of Asian Studies. Some of his current research approaches early Chinese thinkers as virtue ethicists, and so involves considering emotions as perceptions.
Kate Waidler (Cornell) is a graduate student in philosophy at Cornell University. She is currently writing a dissertation on Thomas Aquinas's theory of the passions and in particular the role of *amor* in his moral psychology.