Speakers

Reza Negarestani, MSc (New Centre)

Reza Negarestani is a philosopher and the author, most recently, of Intelligence and Spirit (Urbanomic / Sequence Press). He directs the Critical Philosophy program at the New Centre for Research and Practice.

Rocco Gangle, PhD (Endicott)

Jonathon "Rocco" Gangle is a philosopher whose current research focuses on metaphysics, semiotics, diagrammatic logic, and category theory. He is also one of the foremost translators and expositors of the work of contemporary French thinker Francois Laruelle. He has published several books, including Diagrammatic Immanence: Category Theory and Philosophy (2015) and, with Gianluca Caterina, Iconicity and Abduction (2016). He is co-director of the Center for Diagrammatic and Computational Philosophy. At Endicott, Gangle teaches a variety of courses in philosophy, intellectual history, and religious studies.

Andrei Rodin, PhD (University of Lorraine)

Andrei Rodin is a mathematician, philosopher and historian; his research interests are mainly in (i) the philosophical logic, (ii) the history and philosophy of mathematics and computer science, (iii) in mathematics and computer science education.

Colin McLarty, PhD (Case Western)

Colin McLarty (born July 12, 1951) is an American logician whose publications have ranged widely in philosophy and the foundations of mathematics, as well as in the history of science and of mathematics.

Matt Teichman, PhD (UChicago)

Matt Teichman is Programming Specialist at the Digital Library Development Center at the University of Chicago, where he builds software for digital archiving and does full-stack web development.  His main areas of interest are functional programming, type theory, natural language semantics, and feminist philosophy.  He is also producer and lead host of the Elucidations podcast (https://elucidations.now.sh), a long-running philosophy podcast which was awarded an Emergent Ventures grant (https://www.mercatus.org/emergentventures) through the Mercatus Center in 2019.

Corey Thuro (Independent researcher)

A philosopher and musician based in Baltimore.

David Corfield, PhD (Independent researcher)

David is the author of Towards a Philosophy of Real Mathematics (Cambridge, 2003) and co-author of Why do people get ill? (Hamish-Hamilton, 2007). In 2020, he published Modal Homotopy Type Theory: The Prospect of a New Logic for Philosophy (OUP).

David's research interests include historically-informed philosophy of mathematics; the possible roles for Type theory in philosophy; and the philosophy of medicine, in particular the mind-body relation. His current research concerns the new foundational language for mathematics known as 'homotopy type theory'. 

David is co-director of the Centre for Reasoning at Kent and is also one of the three owners of the blog The n-category Café, where the implications for philosophy, mathematical and physical of the exciting new language of higher-dimensional category theory are discussed. In 2007 David published Why do people get ill? (co-authored with Darian Leader), which aimed to revive interest in the psychosomatic approach to medicine. He intends to carry out further work in the philosophy of medicine. 

Alyssa Van Denburg, PhD (Northwestern)

Dr. Alyssa Newman Van Denburg is a Clinical Sleep Psychologist at Northwestern Medicine and Assistant Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Duke University, completed her Doctoral Internship at Yale University School of Medicine, and completed her Postdoctoral Fellowship at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Dr. Van Denburg has 15 years of research experience at academic medical centers and colleges/universities. The focus of her research is on developing and testing brief behavioral interventions for pain and symptom management.

Dr. Van Denburg has experience working with patients struggling with chronic insomnia, chronic pain, fertility concerns, grief and loss, cancer, and more. Dr. Van Denburg provides cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).

Kristopher Brown, PhD (Topos Institute)

Kris Brown previously completed a postdoc in computer science at UF and a PhD in chemical engineering at Stanford University. Kris is interested in helping scientists (and others) better organize their knowledge and communicate with each other. Kris studies categorical gadgets such as diagrams, sketches, and (co)limits as a language to construct more transparent, extensible, and composable approaches to problems of scientific interest such as constraint solvers, rewrite systems, linear algebra, and model exploration.

Ryan Simonelli, PhD (UChicago)

Ryan Simonelli received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago and his BA from New College of Florida.  He works mainly in philosophy of language and philosophical logic and is particularly concerned with the relationship between the ability to speak a language and the ability to conceptually grasp what things in the world are and how they might be.  As such, his work inevitably crosses over into issues in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and epistemology.  It is also often guided by an implicit or explicit engagement with certain key figures in the history of analytic philosophy, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Wilfrid Sellars.  He also does non-academic philosophy and lots of other things like surfing, swimming, hurting himself skateboarding, blundering pieces in chess, mixing music, and making art.