David S. Oderberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, England and was Head of Department from 2019 to 2023. He is the author of six books including Real Essentialism (2007) and The Metaphysics of Good and Evil (2020), as well as editing or co-editing several others in logic, metaphysics, and ethics, including Classifying Reality (2013). He is also the author of over seventy articles in metaphysics, philosophy of biology, ethics, philosophy of religion, and other subjects. In 2013 Professor Oderberg delivered the George Hourani Lectures at SUNY Buffalo, and in 2023 he delivered the annual E.J. Lowe Lecture at the University of Durham. He is currently Principal Investigator on the Mistakes in Living Systems research project, generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation as part of their global research programme Agency, Directionality, and Function. Prof. Oderberg also edits Ratio, an international journal of analytic philosophy, and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK.

Janice Chik Breidenbach is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ave Maria University. She holds research affiliations at Oxford as Member of the Aquinas Institute, Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, where she was also a Visiting Research Scholar (in 2017 and 2019), and as Senior Affiliate of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2019-20 she was the Barry Research Fellow and Lecturer in Philosophy at University of Pennsylvania. She earned an AB at Princeton University, with degrees in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (now the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs) and in Musical Performance (specializing in violin performance). She earned an MA in Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a Darrell K. Royal Fellow in Ethics and American Society, and a PhD Fellow in the Law and Philosophy Program. She earned her doctorate in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, UK, where she was the Scottish Overseas Research Award Scholar from 2010-2013.

Janice Chik has received research grants from the Royal Institute of Philosophy, the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, the Philosophical Quarterly Research Fund, and the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education. Her research spans the history of philosophy, focusing on the philosophy of action, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and human rights. Her work has been published in Synthese, the Review of Metaphysics, Routledge, New Blackfriars, University of Cambridge Press, T&T Clark Edinburgh, and other venues. She has given scholarly talks at universities in the US and abroad, including: Edinburgh, Oxford, Sharif University of Technology (Iran), the Fashion Institute of Technology, Princeton, Cambridge, KU Leuven, University of Pennsylvania, Notre Dame, and the University of St Andrews. She teaches with a historical approach: her courses have included philosophy of science, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, philosophy of action and mind, and philosophy of nature.

Beyond philosophy, she is classically trained in violin, piano, and voice. She has performed in several orchestras, both collegiate and professional, including the Princeton University Orchestra as Principal Chair and Associate Concertmaster, the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Delaware Valley Philharmonic Orchestra. During her musical career she performed public masterclasses with Andrew Manze, the Tackas Quartet, and the Brentano Quartet. She was the winner of the 14th annual Tampa Bay Symphony Young Artist's Competition, the Orlando Music Society Piano Competition, and was twice awarded first prize in the FSMTA State Concerto Competition. She sang in the Schola Cantorum Princetoniensis at Princeton University, in its heyday.

She is married to the intellectual historian Dr. Michael Breidenbach, with whom she has a son, Paul Thomas.

Robert C. (“Rob”) Koons is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught for 35 years. M. A. Oxford, Ph.D. UCLA. He is the author or co-author of five books, including: Realism Regained (Oxford University Press, 2000) and The Atlas of Reality: A Comprehensive Guide to Metaphysics, with Timothy H. Pickavance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017). He is the co-editor (with George Bealer) of The Waning of Materialism (Oxford University Press, 2010),  (with Nicholas Teh and William Simpson) of Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science (Routledge, 2018), and (with William Simpson and James Orr) of Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Nature (Routledge, 2021). He has been working recently on an Aristotelian interpretation of quantum theory, on defending and articulating Thomism in contemporary terms, and on arguments for classical theism. His forthcoming books include: Is Thomas Aquinas's Philosophy of Nature Obsolete? (St. Augustine Press) and Classical Theism (Routledge), co-edited with Jonathan Fuqua.

Tim O’Connor is Professor of Philosophy and of Cognitive Science at Indiana University and has held research fellowships at the Universities of Notre Dame, St. Andrews, and Oxford. He specializes in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion. He is the author of 90 scholarly articles and reviews and Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will (2000) and Theism and Ultimate Explanation (2008). He has also edited or co-edited five books on the philosophy of mind and action and a sixth on the epistemology of religious belief.

He recently concluded a four-year collaboration with a team of neuroscientists and philosophers in exploring human free will, and a three-year collaboration with a team of cellular biologists and philosophers exploring the implications of recently-discovered cellular phenomena for the unity of the human organism. He is currently co-authoring a book with his former student, Philip Woodward to be titled: Human Persons: A Contemporary Philosophical-Scientific Synthesis.

With ancient philosophy (especially Aristotle) and metaphysics as her areas of specialization, along with a growing interest in philosophy of biology, Peterson's research pursues metaphysical issues in Aristotle in a systematic way and explores their relevance for contemporary metaphysical and scientific discourse.

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Her central focus is on the nature of matter for Aristotle, with respect to its role in both the coming to be and the being of organisms. This interest has fueled her critiques of views that see the diversity of co-specific organisms in Aristotle as derived from the diversity of their matter or form. She argues instead that organisms have their diversity non-derivatively, a thesis she takes to be supported by Aristotle’s metaontology as well as other key Aristotelian metaphysical themes. Her current focus is on the implications of this vision of Aristotelian organisms for the nature of Aristotelian matter, centrally in the context of animal generation (and derivatively in the context of elemental transformation and non-substantial changes).  

On the contemporary front, Peterson is researching how the very different metaontological assumptions predominant today generate different ontological problems (e.g. problems about compositional unity) from the ontological problems Aristotle focused on.  More broadly, she is interested in the relationship between different specific Aristotelian sciences and how they relate to Metaphysics, which he calls first philosophy.  Her anti-reductive project on Aristotelian matter and related metaphysical issues dovetails with her research on homology in contemporary Philosophy of Biology, supporting an account of the homology of biological traits within organisms that references the context of the organism as a whole, and exploring the relevance of key Aristotelian concepts for contemporary debates in Philosophy of Biology.

Nicholas Teh is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at the University of Notre Dame. His research interests center around the philosophy of science (especially modeling and idealization), the philosophy of physics, aesthetics (especially painting and music), and the relationship between these subjects and the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition.