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Having studied philosophy, psychology and Catholic theology at the Otto-Friedrich-University in Bamberg, Germany and for one year at Innsbruck University, Austria, Uwe Voigt received his PhD in Bamberg with a dissertation on the concept of history in John Amos Comenius. At the same institution, he did his “Habilitation” (second major thesis) on information terminology in the light of Aristotle’s concept of the soul. Uwe Voigt now holds a chair of analytic philosophy and philosophy of science at Augsburg University, Germany. From this position, he has contributed to an academic partnership with the Memorial University of Newfoundland for more than a decade, becoming an Adjunct Professor there.

Contemplating classical topics of philosophy with methods from philosophical analysis and phenomenology, Uwe Voigt investigates the intersections between philosophy of mind, especially panpsychism, and environmental philosophy, viewing environmental aesthetics as a place where the crossroads meet.

For more information (in German) and a bibliography, link here.

Barry Stephenson’s teaching and research includes the study of ritual, religion and the arts, and religion in modernity. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Calgary, in 2005. He resides in St. John’s, in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, where he is Associate Professor of Religious Studies in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador (MUN, for short).

A former co-chair of the Ritual Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion, Professor Stephenson was for several years co-editor of Oxford University Press’s Ritual Studies Series. He currently co-directs the After Church Atlas research project, with colleague Dr. Nicholas Lynch. He is author of Excursions in Ritual Studies, Ritual: a very short introduction, Performing the Reformation: Public Ritual in the City of Luther, and Veneration and Revolt: Hermann Hesse and Swabian Pietism. With colleagues Sean McGrath and Kyla Bruff (MUN) he founded and runs the not-for-profit For a New Earth, an environmental action group aiming to raise ecological awareness and activism in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Joachim Rathmann teaches and conducts research on human-environment relations at Julius-Maximilians-Universität of Würzburg, where he works at the chair of Geography and Regional Science in the Institute of Geography and Geology. He is an adjunct professor at the School of Science and the Environment at Memorial University in Newfoundland. His research includes the study of cultural ecosystem services, human-environment relations, philosophy of nature and landscape theory (landscape aesthetics, therapeutic landscapes, environmental-economic landscape assessment.

Tanehisa Otabe is professor of aesthetics at the University of Tokyo. His areas of interest cover eighteenth century German aesthetics as well as intercultural aesthetics. His publications in German include: Ästhetische Subjektivität. Romantik und Moderne (Würzburg 2005) and Kulturelle Identität und Selbstbild. Aufklärung und Moderne in Japan und Deutschland (Berlin 2011). He edited the special issue “The Unconscious” of The Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, vol. 6, issue 2 (2019).

Humboldt Research Fellow (1999–2000, 2005), Philipp Franz von Siebold Award (2007), a board member of the International Schelling-Society (2010– ), President of the Japanese Society for Aesthetics (2013–16), President of the Japanese Schelling-Society (2016–20), Assistant Secretary General of the International Association for Aesthetics (2016–2019) and Member of the Japan Academy (2022– ).

Dr. Jason M. Wirth is professor and chair of philosophy at Seattle University and works and teaches in the areas of Continental Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, Aesthetics (especially film, painting, poetry, and the novel), and Environmental Philosophy. His recent books include Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy (Indiana 2019), Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (SUNY 2017), a monograph on Milan Kundera (Commiserating with Devastated Things, Fordham 2015), Schelling’s Practice of the Wild (SUNY 2015), and the co-edited volume (with Bret Davis and Brian Schroeder), Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (Indiana 2011). He is the associate editor and book review editor of the journal, Comparative and Continental Philosophy. He is currently completing a manuscript on the cinema of Terrence Malick as well as a work of ecological philosophy called Turtle Island Anarchy.

Sean McGrath lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland, with his wife and son, where he is a Full Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University and a member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. A self-described environmentalist, although with a more conservative than leftist leaning, McGrath and his family spend their summers in an off-grid cabin they built on a hill overlooking Conception Bay North. He is also the founder of a Non-Profit Organization in Newfoundland called For a New Earth , which galvanizes local political will around ecological issues in the province.

He is the author of many books, including The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy, Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (Routledge), and the recently published Thinking Nature: An Essay in Negative Ecology. McGrath also serves as the co-chair of the North American Schelling Society (which he founded with Jason Wirth in 2011) and the editor of two academic journals: Kabiri: The Official Journal of the North American Schelling Society, and Analecta Hermeneutica: The Official Journal of the International Institute for Hermeneutics.