Notes on Contributors
Victoria Aizkalna
Since she started taking an interest in Philosophy, her journey has taken her a long way from Metaphysics to Analytical Philosophy, and finally to the Philosophy of Mind. Studying and trying to understand the way people perceive and structure the information in their mind is her main fascination: how it can be used to improve the quality of intellectual and daily life, how it can be utilized in the field of education, and how it can help people understand each other on a compassionate and emphatic level. Understanding the way we think can help people overcome the barrier of the I–Them thinking, and change from Us versus Them thinking model, to I among Us. She started her academic journey at the University of Latvia, where she had an opportunity to connect with the international Philosophy community via the International Philosophy Olympiad (ipo-unesco). Alongside with it, she has been a part of multiple academic events and conferences as a co-organiser, and has been giving lectures and accommodated workshops on critical thinking and Analytical Philosophy.
Rosa E. Belvedresi
is currently Professor of Philosophy of History at Universidad Nacional de La Plata and a researcher at CONICET (Argentinean Council for Scientific Investigations). Her main academic interest is historical experience and its relationship to temporal consciousness, especially regarding the expectations of future.
Giovanna Costantini
is a teacher of English and English Speaking Countries Culture and Literatures in Rome. She graduated in Foreign Languages and Literatures in 2001 and in Science of Education in 2016. In 1998 and 2000, she had a leave for studies at the University of Miami and at Columbia University, for conducting her thesis research. She got a master’s degree in Public Relations in 2002 and a master’s degree in School Management and Administration in 2017 (Rome). In 2008, Costantini started teaching in Public Secondary schools, where she passed two teaching qualifications and a national competition. In 2014 and in 2016 she took part in the Food Conference and the Empathy Conference in Oxford (UK), organized by Interdisciplinary-Net. Her essay “Italian food: the Pride of a People without Borders” was published by Brill in the volume Who Decides? (2018). From 2014 to 2017 she cooperated with the University of International Studies in Rome as a subject matter expert and journal reviewer.
Ricardo Gutiérrez Aguilar
(MA in Philosophy, 2006; National Prize in Philosophy, 2008; MA in Teachers Training, 2008) is Assistant Professor and Researcher in Philosophy at the Logic and Theoretical Philosophy Department (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). He holds a PhD (2014) with an European Mention awarded by u.n.e.d. (Spain). He received the degree of Doktor der Philosophie from the Technische Universität zu Berlin (2014) as well. Pre-doctoral fellow at the National Spanish Research Council (c.s.i.c. – Instituto de Filosofía) under the tutorship of Prof. Dr. Roberto R. Aramayo (2007–2010), and a Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher at TU Berlin (Project ENGLOBE. Enlightenment and Global History – FP7-PEOPLE-238285)(2010–2013), Dr. Gutiérrez has focused his research interests mainly in Analytical Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Mind. Narratives and values encrypted in them – or the absence thereof – throughout the course of ordered events and actions and the subsequent critique of the historian’s task with the help of ladden-institutional instruments centered his developments in those fields. Amongst Dr. Gutiérrez’s most recent publications can be counted his Virtud y Sistema. Juicio moral y filosofía de la Historia en Kant [Virtue and System. Moral Judgement and philosophy of History in Kant] (Alamanda, 2018) and Deuda y legado en la filosofía de la Historia de Schiller [Debt and Legacy in Schiller’s philosophy of History] (Herder, 2018). He is Member of the Editorial Board of Con-textos Kantianos. International Journal of Philosophy (WoS, scopus International Journal) as well.
Irina Ionita
holds a PhD in Development Studies granted by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. She is currently working in Public Policy for elderly and Aging Programs, while specializing in Conflict Mediation.
Nina Lex
(Technische Universität Berlin), after finishing her studies in Philosophy, German Literature, and Art History, became a PhD candidate in the itn-Marie Curie Fellowship Training Program (2010–2013). A former fellow of the dfh Scholarship, her work on a Theory of the Subject according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau profited from the exchange with a variety of research institutes, which included the Barnard College at the Columbia University in New York and the Instituto de Filosofía–csic in Madrid. She is a member of the IiAphR (Internationaler, interdisziplinärer Arbeitskreis für philosophische Reflexion) while her philosophical focus has meanwhile extended to work at the interface of philosophical theory, discursive practice and performative arts.
Gerardo López Sastre
is Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities of Toledo, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. He studied Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid and also completed his PhD there. He translated into Spanish the Enquiry concerning the principles of Morals, by David Hume (2007), the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Filonus, by Berkeley (1996), and the Three Essays on Religion, by John Stuart Mill (2014). He is the editor of the volume David Hume. Nuevas perspectivas sobre su obra (2005); and coedited the volumes Cosmopolitismo y nacionalismo. De la Ilustración al mundo contemporáneo (2010), and Civilizados y salvajes. La mirada de los ilustrados sobre el mundo no europeo (2016). His latest publications are the books Hume. Cuándo saber ser escéptico (2015), and John Stuart Mill. El utilitarismo que cambiaría el mundo (2017).
Barış Mete
is an Assistant Professor in the English Language and Literature Department of Selçuk University (Turkey) where he has been teaching Comparative Short Story, Contemporary British Novel and Literary Criticism. He had his BA in English Language and Literature and his MA in English Literature from Hacettepe University. He completed his PhD at the Middle East Technical University, again in English Literature. He has written articles on the twentieth-century British novel, particularly the works of John Fowles and Iris Murdoch and is now finishing a book on the Mimetic Theory of Art.
Paulus Pimomo
is Professor of English at Central Washington University (Ellensburg, USA). He was educated in northeast India and the USA, and has taught in both countries. He teaches Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, World Literature Theory, African American Literature and American Multicutural Literatures. His publications are in diverse fields, including on postcolonial studies (Critical Quarterly, UK, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, USA), Literature, Empathy and Crises Studies (Inter-Disciplinary Press, UK), Indo/Naga Politics and Naga Cultural Studies (Economic & Political Weekly and others in India), and three English usage dictionaries for Japanese learners of English as second language, with Hidemi Masamura (Taishukan & Shogakukan, Japan).
Johannes Rohbeck
studied Philosophy and Political Science at the University of Bonn and at Freie Universität Berlin. Doctor in 1976, Prof. Rohbeck got his Habilitation (postdoctoral degree with lecture qualification) in Philosophy in 1985. From 1993 till 2012 held a position as Professor for Practical Philosopy and Didactics of Philosophy at Technische Universität Dresden. Between 2012 and 2018, Prof. Rohbeck held a Senior Professorship at this University. In the academic year 2018/19 he was Invited Professor at Universidad Carlos iii Madrid (UC3M). Amongst his books published, Egoismus und Sympathie (1978), Die Fortschrittstheorie der Aufklärung (1987), Technologische Urteilskraft (1993), Technik − Kultur − Geschichte (2000), Geschichtsphilosophie zur Einführung (2004), Marx (2006), Aufklärung und Geschichte (2010), and Zukunft der Geschichte (2013) are of special relevance.
Judy Rollins
PhD, RN, President of Rollins & Associates research and consulting; Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine with a secondary appointment in the Department of Pediatrics at Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington, DC; and Adjunct Lecturer at the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. She is a nurse with a fine arts degree in Visual Arts, a master’s in Child Development/Family Studies, and a PhD in Health and Community Studies. She has developed arts in healthcare programming in hospitals, hospice care, and the community, including Studio G, the artists in residence program in pediatrics at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. Her writing and research interests include arts in healthcare, family-centered care, and psychosocial issues of care, with a focus on children with cancer. She is editor of Meeting Children’s Psychosocial Needs Across the Health-care Continuum, now in its second edition; editor of Pediatric Nursing; North America regional editor of Arts & Health; and a Scholar at the Institute for Integrative Health, Baltimore, MD.
Josefa Ros Velasco
is Teaching Assistant and RCC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She is conducting a multidisciplinary research on the evolutionary role of boredom from a philosophical-anthropological point of view to argue against the widespread understanding of boredom as a pathological personality trait whereby medicalization of such a common, daily annoyance is legitimized. As part of this approach, she is examining how the comprehension of boredom in terms of a mental disease has gradually formed historically as a result of the act of taking at face value the metaphor of boredom as an illness, especially represented in nineteenth-century Western literature and philosophy. Dr. Ros Velasco holds a PhD in Philosophy with International Mention at the Excellent Program of Doctorate in Philosophy at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (ucm) as an fpu scholar; MA in Contemporary Thought; and MA in Teachers Training. She was visiting researcher at Zentrum für Kultur und Technikforschung at Stuttgart Universität (Germany) as a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst scholar, and at the Deutsches Literatur-Archiv Marbach as a dla and mecd fellow. She is a member of the research groups Saavedra Fajardo Library for Hispanic Political Thought at ucm; History and Videogames at the University of Murcia; and History and Philosophy of Emotions at cchs-csic. She is the editor or author of the books Feminism. Past, Present, and Future Perspectives (Nova, 2017), Contemporary Approaches in Philosophical and Humanistic Thought (Aracne, 2017), and Hans Blumenberg. Literatura, estética y nihilismo (Trotta, 2016), and of academic papers such as “Hans Blumenbergs’ Philosophical Anthropology of Boredom” (Karl Aber, 2018), “Boredom: humanizing or dehumanizing treatment” (Vernon, 2018), and “Boredom: A Comprehensive Study of the State of Affairs” (Themata, 2017). She is currently working in her next books: La enfermedad del aburrimiento (2019), Boredom is in your mind (Springer, 2019), The Culture of Boredom (Brill, 2019), and The Faces of Depression in Literature (Peter Lang, 2019).
Christopher J. Staley
is a PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh (USA). mfa in Acting from the American Repertory Theatre/Moscow Art Theatre Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University; BS in Theatre and Psychology from Skidmore College. Research interests include the intersections of performance studies, cognitive science, and existential psychology. Chris has presented “Lorca’s Corpses and their Mothers: Death and the Maternal in the Rural Tragedies” for the Kristeva Circle 2017 Conference, and “Demonstrating the Actor’s Process: Empathic Projection in Sophocles’ Ajax” for the University of Pittsburgh Department of Classics Conference on “Empathy, Sympathy, and Compassion: The Dynamics of Other-Oriented Emotions.” As a theatre practitioner, he has performed at the American Repertory Theater, Indiana Repertory Theater, Moscow Art Theatre, Opera Carolina, and others. Training includes siti Company intensives at Skidmore College, a summer intensive with the Suzuki Company of Toga in Japan, and participation with the Watermill Center International Summer Program. Chris is an acting teacher, director, and avid yoga instructor.