Ursula Renz has been working on Spinoza for almost twenty years. She has published widely on early modern philosophy (Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Shaftesbury), Kant, and the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism (Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer), as well as on the emotions, self-knowledge, and the problem of epistemic trust. She has recently edited Self-Knowledge. A History (2017), and is now working on issues related with the ideal of self-knowledge, the concept of wisdom and the human life form in early modern philosophy. Her book on Spinoza, Die Erklärbarkeit der Erfahrung, which is also an important source for the project, was awarded the Journal of the History of Philosophy Book Prize in 2011. An English translation is published Oxford University Press in 2018. In 2020, she accepted a professorship at the University of Graz.
Sarah Tropper’s predominant research interest lies in early modern philosophy with a particular focus on early modern rationalism. She wrote her PhD at King’s College London on the genesis and implications of the notion of simplicity in Leibniz’s metaphysics. Within the project, she worked as a postdoc researcher on Spinoza’s conceptions of ‘form’ and ‘species’.
Barnaby Hutchins works on points of failure in systems of thought, mostly in the context of
early modern philosophy. His PhD was on nonreductionism in Descartes’s biology, and its
relation to his metaphysics and epistemology. He is now working on the role of the human
standpoint in Spinoza’s metaphysics and epistemology – in particular, its apparent conflict
with his monism. He was previously a research fellow at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and a
visiting scholar at Duke University.
Oliver Istvan Toth was a PhD student at Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, before he moved to the University of Klagenfurt and then to the University of Graz. He wrote his dissertation under the supervision of Ursula Renz on the relationship of imagination, intellect and consciousness in Spinoza’s philosophy of mind.
Philip Waldner was a PhD-Researcher at the University of Klagenfurt, before he moved to the University of Graz. He completed his Master’s degree at the Institute for Philosophy in Vienna with a Thesis on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema. His PhD-thesis reconstructs Spinoza’s conception of language as it is entailed in his political writings.
Roman Schmid is a graduate student at the University of Klagenfurt. He completed his Master’s degree at the Munich School of Philosophy with a Thesis on Arthur Schopenhauer. He is currently working on temporal categories in Spinoza’s related with the human life form and their impact on the understanding of the human outlook on modalities and free will.
Marion Blancher is a PhD student with Pierre-François Moreau at the ENS in Lyon and writes her dissertation about the human relationships as conditions of a political and ethical freedom by Spinoza. She is particularly interesting in the third aspect of the project.
Namita Herzl was student assistant in the project and graduated in 2021 at the University Graz with an MA-thesis on Spinoza’s conception of love. She is interested in Spinoza’s theory of emotions as well as the concept of human freedom. In 2019, she got involved the project Geschichten der Philosophie in Globaler Perspective (PI: Rolf Elberfeld), where she is now writing her PhD.