Project Team

Andrew Chignell

Project Co-Director

Andrew Chignell is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his doctorate in philosophy and religious studies from Yale University, and is the recipient of numerous fellowships, recently the ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars. He works primarily in 17th-18th century philosophy (especially Kant), epistemology, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion, and has also written on hope, acceptance, and the ethics of belief. He has published articles in numerous professional journals including Philosophical Review, Mind, Noûs, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and Philosophical Quarterly. He has co-edited several volumes, including a book on religion and the ethics of belief with Cambridge University Press, and his book on Kantian conceptions of hope, What May I Hope? Answers to a Kantian Question, is forthcoming as part of Routledge's Kantian Questions series.

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Samuel Newlands

Project Co-Director

Samuel Newlands is the William J. and Dorothy K. O'Neill Collegiate Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and Co-Director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion. He received his doctorate in philosophy from Yale University, and was a principal investigator on a multi-year research initiative, “The Problem of Evil in Modern and Contemporary Thought.” He works primarily in early modern philosophy, philosophy of religion, and metaphysics and has published articles in numerous journals, including Philosophical Review, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Noûs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Philosophy Compass. He has received an NEH fellowship for his work on Spinoza, and he has co-edited two books, including a recent volume on Leibniz’s Theodicy, New Essays on Leibniz’s Theodicy (OUP, 2014).

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Joshua Seachris

Project Manager

Joshua Seachris is Program Director for the Center for Philosophy of Religion and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. From 2010-2014 he was project manager for The Character Project and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oklahoma, and is the author of articles on a range of topics, including the problem of evil, Confucius and virtue, the meaning of life, and death. He has published articles in numerous journals, including Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Religious Studies, Philo, Asian Philosophy, and the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. He is the editor of Exploring the Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) and God and Meaning: New Essays (with Stewart Goetz) (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), and co-author of What is this thing Called the Meaning of Life? (with Stewart Goetz) (Routledge, forthcoming). He is currently working on a monograph on life's meaning.

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