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.
Joseph Bobik
Professor (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame), whose primary interests are medieval metaphysics and philosophy of religion, is a contributor to The Concept of Matter (edited by Ernan McMullin, 1963) and to New Themes in Christian Philosophy (edited by Ralph McInerny, 1968).
He was the recipient of a University Grant as Visiting Scholar at UCLA (spring and summer, 1966). Among his writings are the following books: Aquinas on Being and Essence (1965), The Nature of Philosophical Inquiry (editor, 1970) and The Commentary of Conrad of Prussia on the De Ente et Essentia of St. Thomas Aquinas (text co-edited with James A. Corbett, introduction and commentary by Joseph Bobik, 1989). His articles include "The Sixth Way of Maritain" (1974), "A Seventh Way" (1976), "Immortality" (1977), "The Sixth Way of St. Thomas Aquinas" (1978), "Aquinas on Friendship with God" (1986), "Aquinas on Communicatio, The Foundation of Friendship and Caritas" (1986), and "Aquinas' Fourth Way and the Approximating Relation" (1987).
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).
Cornelius F. Delaney
Professor (Ph.D., St. Louis University), specializes in the history of American philosophy, the history of modern philosophy, contemporary epistemology and political philosophy.
Delaney teaches in both the Philosophy Department of which he was the chair from 1972 to 1982 and in the University Honors Program of which he has been the Director since 1990. His teaching has been in the areas of Pragmatism, Political Philosophy and the History of Modern Philosophy, and his most recent research has focused on the interpenetration of philosophy and science both in its historical instantiation in the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce and its more general philosophical articulation. Science, Knowledge and Mind (1993) began the inquiry and a monograph on The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (2004) is presently nearing completion. The culmination of the project will be an historical monograph on Pragmatic Realism currently in process.
Thomas P. Flint
Professor and director of the Center (Ph.D. University of Notre Dame), 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), 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).
John I. Jenkins, C.S.C.
President of the University of Notre Dame (D.Phil., Oxford University; S.T.L. Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley)
Rev. John Jenkins, C.S.C. was an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department and served as an Associate Provost and Vice President of the university. Areas of scholarly interest include medieval philosophy, particularly Aquinas and Augustine, philosophy of religion and epistemology. Areas of administrative responsibility in the Provost's Office include undergraduate studies and international studies. He received a B.A. and M.A. in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame (1976, 1978), a Licentiate in Sacred Theology from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley (1984) and a D.Phil. in philosophy from Oxford University (1989). Author of Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and of articles which have appeared in The Journal of Philosophy, Medieval Philosophy and Theology and the Journal of Religious Ethics.
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).
Ralph McInerny
Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies and director of the Jacques Maritain Center (Ph.D., Laval University).
McInerny has taught at the University of Notre Dame since 1955, and since 1978 he has been the Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies. For seven years he was Director of the Medieval Institute; since 1979 he has been Director of the Jacques Maritain Center. He has published extensively both academically and in the field of fiction. He was recently appointed to membership on President Bush's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. He delivered the Gifford Lectures in Glasgow. He received the Bouchercon Lifetime Achievement Award for writing.
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).
Alvin Plantinga
John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy and former director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion (Ph.D., Yale), 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
Associate Director, Center for Philosophy of Religioin, associate professor, (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).
Kenneth M. Sayre
Professor (Ph.D., Harvard University), founder (1965) and director of the Philosophic Institute, specializes in Plato, epistemology and the philosophy of mind.
He is editor or co-editor of The Modeling of Mind: Computers and Intelligence (1963), Philosophy and Cybernetics (1967), Values in the Electric Power Industry (1977), Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century (1979) and Reason and Decision (1982). He is the author of Recognition: A Study in the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (1965), Consciousness: A Philosophic Study of Minds and Machines (1969), Plato's Analytic Method (1969), Cybernetics and the Philsophy of Mind (1976), Moonflight (1977), Starburst (1977) and Plato's Late Ontology: A Riddle Resolved (1983), as well as several dozen articles. He is also co-author of Regulation, Values and the Public Interest (1980). He was Visiting Scholar at Princeton University in 1966-67, Visiting Professor at Bowling Green State University in 1981, and Visiting Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, in 1985.
Ted A. Warfield
Associate 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).
Director and Board Members
Overseeing the numerous activities of the program is the director of the Center. The current director is Thomas Flint, Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame. The director is aided by an associate director and an Executive Board, which consists of members of Notre Dame's Department of Philosophy who specialize in the philosophy of religion. The current associate director is Michael C Rea. Alvin Plantinga, Rev. David B. Burrell, Frederick J. Crosson, Peter van Inwagen and Ted A. Warfield are the other 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 William Lane Craig (Biola University, CA), David Hunt (Whittier College, CA), Brian Leftow (Oxford University), Michael Murray (Franklin & Marshall, PA), Rev. Brian Shanley, O.P. (Catholic University of America, DC), Eleonore Stump (St. Louis University, MO), Linda Zagzebski (University of Oklahoma, OK), and Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers, NJ).
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.