For more than twenty years, the University of Notre Dame has been one of the best places in the world to conduct research in the philosophy of religion. Below are profiles of Notre Dame faculty members who have published extensively in or have serious research interests the field and who have, to varying degrees, been involved in the activities of the Center.
Faculty Profiles
Robert Audi
David E. Gallo Professor of Business Ethics (Ph.D. University of Michigan), whose fields of expertise also include epistemology, philosophy of action, and philosophy of religion, is the author of Naturalism, Realism, and Ethical Objectivity (2003), Ethical Generality and Moral Judgement (2003), and The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value (2004) among many others. He is a past president of the Society of Christian Philosophers, and an editor of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Book Series.
Richard Cross
Rev. John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy (D.Phil, University of Oxford), whose area of interestes include medieval philosophy and theology, and history of philosophical theology.
Thomas P. Flint
Professor of Philosophy and former director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion (Ph.D. University of Notre Dame), Flint was a Harper Instructor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago for two years (1980 to 1982) prior to returning to Notre Dame. Flint publishes and/or teaches in philosophical theology, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, the history of political theory, and Greek drama. His written work centers mainly on divine and human freedom (especially on questions concerning divine providence and the Incarnation). He edited Christian Philosophy (1990) and co-edited (with Eleonore Stump) Hermes and Athena: Biblical Exegesis and Philosophical Theology (1993). In 1998, his Divine Providence: The Molinist Account was published by Cornell University Press. Recent articles include "A New Anti-Anti-Molinist Argument?" (1999), "A Death He Freely Accepted: Molinist Reflections on the Incarnation" (2001), "The Possibilities on Incarnation: Some Radical Molinist Suggestions" (2001), "The Multiple Muddles of Maverick Molinism" (2002), "Risky Business: Open Theism and the Incarnation" (2004), and "The Basket That Never Was" (forthcoming).
Alfred J. Freddoso
Professor (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame), was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University from 1977 to 1979. His main interests are metaphysics, medieval philosophy, and philosophical theology.
His books include translations of and introductions to William of Ockham, Part II of the Summa Logicae (1980); Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge: Part IV of the Corcordia (1988); and William of Ockham, Quodlibetal Questions (1991). He also edited The Existence and Nature of God (1983). Recent papers include "Human Nature, Potency and the Incarnation" (1985), "The Necessity of Nature" (1986), "Medieval Aristotelianism and the Case Against Secondary Causation in Nature" (1988), "Ontological Reductionism and Faith versus Reason: A Critique of Adams on Ockham" (1991). He was a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1984 and 1988, and is a past associate editor of Faith and Philosophy.
Gary Gutting
Professor (Ph.D., St. Louis University), Gutting received a postdoctoral Fulbright Grant to Louvain (1968-69) and is interested primarily in philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, metaphilosophy and contemporary French philosophy.
Gutting's areas of interest include contemporary French philosophy, philosophy of science, and philosophy of religion. He is the co-author of The Synoptic Vision: The Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars (1977), and the editor of Paradigms and Revolutions: Applications and Appraisals of Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy of Science (1980), Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism (1982), co-editor of "Science and Reality: Essays in Honor of Ernan McMullin" (1984), "Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason" (1989), editor of T"he Cambridge Companion to Foucault" (1994), and "Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity" (1998). Gutting's recent articles include "Continental Approaches to History and Philosophy of Science," in G.N. Cantor, et. al., Companion to the History of Modern Science (1989), "Gaston Bachelard's Philosophy of Science," International Studies in the Philosophy of Science (1987), "Foucault's Genealogical Method," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XV (1990); and "Plantinga and the Rationality of Religious Belief," in Tessin and von der Ruhr (eds.), Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief (1995).
Michael Loux
Ignatius A. O'Shaughnessy Professor of Philosophy (Ph.D., University of Chicago), served for seven years as Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Notre Dame. His primary areas of interest are Greek philosophy, philosophy of language, and metaphysics.
He has authored Substance and Attribute (1978) and Primary Ousia: An Essay on Aristotle's Metaphysics Z and H (1991), edited Universals and Particulars (1970) and The Possible and the Actual ((1990), and translated and introduced Ockham's Theory of Terms: Part I of the Summa Logicae (1974). In addition, he is a co-author of The Synoptic Vision (1977) and Recent Studies in Philosophy (1983). Among his published articles are "Identity and Compresence" (1979), "Form, Species, and Predication" (1979), "Significatio and Suppositio" (1980), "Ousia: A Prolegomenon to Metaphysics Z and H" (1984), "A Scotistic ARgument for the Existence of a First Cause" (1984), "Toward an Aristotelian Theory of Abstract Objects" (1986) and "Aristotle and Parmenides: An Interpretation of Physics A.8." (1993).
Samuel Newlands 
Associate Director, Center for Philosophy of Religion; Assistant Professor of Philosophy (PhD, Yale University). Area of interests include early modern philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion.
He recently received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work on his monograph Reconceiving Spinoza. Recent articles include "Another Kind of Spinozistic Monism" (Nous, forthcoming); "The Harmony of Spinoza and Leibniz" (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, forthcoming); "The Problem of Evil" (Routledge Companion to Seventeenth Century Philosophy, forthcoming); "Spinoza's Relevance for Contemporary Metaphysics and Philosophy of Mind" (Oxford Handbook to Spinoza, forthcoming); "Spinoza's Modal Metaphysics" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). He is also the co-editor (with Larry Jorgensen) of Metaphysics and the Good: Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Merrihew Adams (Oxford, 2009).
John O'Callaghan
Associate Professor of Philosophy (PhD, University of Notre Dame), whose area of interests include medieval philosophy, Thomas Aquinas, and Thomistic metaphysics.
Alvin Plantinga
Rev. John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy and former director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion (Ph.D., Yale), Plantinga works in philosophy of religion, epistemology and metaphysics.
He is the author of God and Other Minds (1967), The Nature of Necessity (1974), God, Freedom and Evil (1974), Does God Have a Nature? (1980), Warrant: The Current Debate (1993), Warrant and Proper Function (1993), and Warranted Christian Belief (2000), as well as the editor of Faith and Philosophy (1964), The Ontological Argument (1965), and (with Nicholas Wolterstorff) Faith and Rationality (1984), and contributed to The Analytic Theist ed. by James Sennett, and Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality, ed. by Matthew Davidson. In addition, he has published many papers, including: his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association (Western Division), "How to Be an Anti-Realist" (1983); his inaugural lecture as O'Brien Professor, "Advice to Christian Philosophers" (1983); and "Reason and Belief in God" (1984). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. In addition, he has given the Matchette Lectures (1976), the Freemantle Lectures (1980), the Aquinas Lecture (1980), the Gifford Lectures (1986-87 and 2005), the Wilde Lectures (1987), and the Stanton Lectures (2004). A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a past president of the Society of Christian Philosophers and was president of the Central Division of the APA.
Michael C. Rea
Director, Center for Philosophy of Religion; Professor of Philosophy (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame). Areas of interest are metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion.
Selected Bibliography:
Books: World Without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism (Oxford University Press, 2002); Material Constitution: A Reader (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997)
Recent Articles: "The Problem of Material Constitution" in The Philosophical Review (1995); "Temporal Parts Unmotivated" in The Philosophical Review (1998); "In Defense of Mereological Universalism," in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (1998); "Theism and Epistemic Truth Equivalences" in Nous (2000); "How to be an Eleatic Monist" in Philosophical Perspectives (2001); "Four Dimensionalism" in The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics (2002).
Peter van Inwagen
John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Philosophy (Ph.D., Rochester), whose are of interests include metaphysics and philosophical theology.
Ted A. Warfield
Professor of Philosophy (PhD, Rutgers). Warfield is a proud member of the Executive Board of the Center for Philosophy of Religion.
Warfield’s work ranges broadly across analytic philosophy. His recent work includes work in philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and applied ethics. Within philosophy of religion he works on foreknowledge, religious epistemology, religious pluralism, and the methodology of philosophical theology. He has taught courses on the problem of evil, and on general topics in philosophy of religion (including Hell and Univeralism, religion and politics, and the freedom/foreknowledge debate).
Emeriti Faculty Profiles
David Burrell, C.S.C.
Theodore M. Hesburgh Professor in Philosophy and Theology (Ph.D., Yale University), holds an S.T.L. from the Gregorian University in Rome.
David Burrell, C.S.C. is currently Theodore Hesburgh Professor in Philosophy and Theology at the University of Notre Dame, and has been working since 1982 in comparative issues in philosophical theology in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as evidenced in "Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas" (Notre Dame, 1986) and "Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions" (Notre Dame, 1993), "Friendship and Ways to Truth" (Notre Dame, 2000), and two translations of "Al-Ghazali: Al-Ghazali on the Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God" (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society,1993) and "Al-Ghazali on Faith in Divine Unity and Trust in Divine Providence" [Book 35 of his Ihya Ulum ad-Din] (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2001). With Elena Malits he co-authored "Original Peace" (New York: Paulist, 1998).
Frederick J. Crosson
John J. Cavanaugh Professor in the Humanities at Notre Dame (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame), is the former director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion and the former president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.
He was a French Government Fellow at the University of Paris (1951-52) and a Belgian-American Foundation Fellow at the University of Louvain (1957-58). The former dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Notre Dame, he is the editor of Science and Contemporary Society (1967), Human and Artificial Intelligence (1970) and The Autonomy of Religious Belief (1981). Among his published articles are "Religion and Faith in Augustine's Confessions" (1979), "Proof and Presence" (1980), "Maritain and Natural Rights" (1983), "Psyche and the Computer" (1985), "Intentionality and Atheism" (1987), "Structure and Meaning in Augustine's Confessions" (1989), "The Analogy of Religion" (1990), "Newman and Augustine" (1993) and "Hume's Unnatural Religion" (1993).
Ernan McMullin
John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Philosophy, emeritus, (Ph.D., University of Louvain) was director of the Ph.D. program in History and Philosophy of Science.
He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the International Academy of the History of Science. His research interests lie in contemporary philosophy of science, in the history of the philosophy of science, and in the interrelations of science and religion. He is the author of Newton on Matter and Activity (1978) and The Inference that Makes Science (1992), and has edited numerous works, including Galileo, Man of Science (1967), Evolution and Creation (1985) and The Social Dimensions of Science (1992). Among his recent articles are "Realism in Theology and Science" (1985), "Natural Science and Belief in a Creator" (1987), "Fine-tuning the Universe?" (1991), "Evolution and Special Creation" (1992) and "Cosmology and Religion" (1993).
Director and Board Members
Overseeing the numerous activities of the program are the director and associate director of the Center. The current director is Michael C. Rea, Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame. Samuel Newlands, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame, is the current associate director. The director and associate director are aided by an Executive Board, which consists of members of Notre Dame's Department of Philosophy who specialize in the philosophy of religion. Robert Audi, Richard Cross, Frederick Crosson, Thomas P. Flint, Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, and Ted Warfield are members of the Executive Board.
In addition, an Advisory Board of distinguished philosophers from outside Notre Dame assists the director. Current members of the Advisory Board are Michael Bergmann (Purdue University), Jeffrey Brower (Purdue University), Susan Brower-Toland (St. Louis University), Andrew Chignell (Cornell University), Oliver Crisp (University of Bristol), Mark Murphy (Georgetown University), Eleonore Stump (St. Louis University), and Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers).
Funding for the Center has been generously provided by the University of Notre Dame and by grants from the J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust and from the De Rance Foundation.