Invited Speakers
Rik Peels
Rik Peels is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department (Faculty of Humanities) and the Beliefs and Practices Department (Faculty of Religion and Theology) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His main research topic is the ethics of belief. He has developed a theory of responsible belief, studied ignorance, criticized scientism and developed a common sense alternative, explored the ethics of religious belief, and delved into the epistemic responsibilities of universities. He is currently leading an ERC Starting Grant named "Extreme Beliefs: The Epistemology and Ethics of Fundamentalism" (2020-2025). He is the author of Responsible Belief: A Theory in Ethics and Epistemology (Oxford University Press).
Luca Di Blasi
Luca Di Blasi is Professor of Philosophy at the Theological Faculty of the University of Bern in Switzerland. He studied political economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, German literature, and philosophy at the University of Vienna and earned his PhD in philosophy at the Catholic University of Eichstätt. In 2015, he habilitated in philosophy at the University of Bern. Since 2014, he has been Associate Member of the ICI Berlin. Luca Di Blasi’s theoretical main interest revolves around the relation between philosophy and religion: theoretical approaches to religion and the religious dimension of philosophy. Other fields of research include modern continental philosophy, political theology, and cultural theory. His publications include: Dezentrierungen. Studien zur Religion der Philosophie im 20. Jahrhundert; Der weiße Mann: Ein Anti-Manifest; and The Scandal of Self- Contradiction: Pasolini's Multistable Geographies, Subjectivities, and Traditions.
Faisal Devji
Faisal Devji is Professor of Indian History at the University of Oxford. He is interested in intellectual history and political thought of modern South Asia as well as in the emergence of Islam as a global category. He has written on negative categories of identification and negative notions of non-violence in South Asia, on cultural and philosophical meanings of violence and the emergence of non-violence as a political project. His recent work deals with efforts to think beyond the nation-state and the inheritance of anarchism in the post-colonial world. Two of his publications involve Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea, and The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence. Professor Devji has held faculty positions at the New School in New York, Yale University, and the University of Chicago, from where he also received his Ph.D. in Intellectual History.
Melanie Altanian
Melanie Altanian is a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Bern and at University College Dublin. Her PhD project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, investigated the ethical and epistemological dimensions and implications of genocide denialism. She has published several journal articles and contributed papers on the topic, as well as taught courses on denialism, ignorance, epistemic injustice and genocide. Her most recent publication, Remembrance and Denial of Genocide: On the Interrelations of Testimonial and Hermeneutical Injustice, appeared in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies special issue on Themes from Testimonial Injustice and Trust (2021), which she guest edited with Maria Baghramian. Her book The Epistemic Injustice of Genocide Denialism is forthcoming with Routledge, Studies in Epistemology.
