Career
She has a Bachelor of Divinity (BD), specialising in philosophy of religion and ethics, from King's College London. [1] She has a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree from Queens' College, Cambridge, where her research focused on Don Cupitt and Iris Murdoch. [2] Her doctoral thesis was titled "The ontology of quasi-theism: a study of two twentieth century reinterpretations of the Christian faith" and was completed in 1995. [3]
She was a lecturer in religious studies at Suffolk College, Ipswich, from 1992 until she came to Heythrop in 1999. From 2000 to 2003 she was the course director for the University of London BD for External Students. [1] She was promoted to reader in philosophy of religion in 2017. [2]
She currently teaches an intercollegiate philosophy of religion course for the University of London MA philosophy, and also teaches interpreting religious language, and conducts the seminars and tutorials for philosophy, religion and ethics students.
Frederick Charles Copleston was an English Roman Catholic Jesuit priest, philosopher, and historian of philosophy, best known for his influential multi-volume A History of Philosophy (1946–75).
Theism is broadly defined as the belief in the existence of at least one deity. In common parlance, or when contrasted with deism, the term often describes the classical conception of God that is found in monotheism — or gods found in polytheistic religions — a belief in God or in gods without the rejection of revelation as is characteristic of deism. Gnosticism is the belief in personal spiritual knowledge.
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net (1954), was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Her 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize. In 1987, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Richard Granville Swinburne is an English philosopher. He is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years Swinburne has been a proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in the philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. He aroused much discussion with his early work in the philosophy of religion, a trilogy of books consisting of The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason.
Paul Johannes Tillich was a German-American Christian existentialist philosopher, religious socialist, and Lutheran theologian who was one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. Tillich taught at German universities before immigrating to the United States in 1933, where he taught at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, and the University of Chicago.
Heythrop College, University of London, was a constituent college of the University of London between 1971 and 2018, last located in Kensington Square, London. It comprised the university's specialist faculties of philosophy and theology with social sciences, offering undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses and five specialist institutes and centres to promote research. It had a close affiliation with the Roman Catholic Church, through the British Province of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) whose scholarly tradition went back to a 1614 exiled foundation in Belgium and whose extensive library collections it housed. While maintaining its denominational links and ethos the college welcomed all faiths and perspectives, women as well as men.
Charles Hartshorne was an American philosopher who concentrated primarily on the philosophy of religion and metaphysics, but also contributed to ornithology. He developed the neoclassical idea of God and produced a modal proof of the existence of God that was a development of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument. Hartshorne is also noted for developing Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy into process theology.
Peter Christian Vardy is a British theologian. The author or co-author of 18 books about religion and ethics, Vardy was vice-principal of Heythrop College, a Jesuit college in London, from 1999 to 2011. He is known for the religious-studies conferences he runs in the UK for schools.
The Oxford Socratic Club was a student club that met from 1942 to 1954 dedicated to providing an open forum for the discussion of the intellectual difficulties connected with religion and with Christianity in particular.
Brian Evan Anthony Davies is a British philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and friar. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University, and author of An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, now in its fourth English edition, which has been translated into five languages.
William F. Vallicella is an American philosopher.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to metaphysics:
Agnostic atheism or atheistic agnosticism is a philosophical position that encompasses both atheism and agnosticism. Agnostic atheists are atheistic because they do not hold a belief in the existence of any deity, and are agnostic because they claim that the existence of a demiurgic entity or entities is either unknowable in principle or currently unknown in fact.
The following outline is provided as an overview of, and topical guide to, theology.
Articles related to philosophy of religion include:
Charles Taliaferro is an American philosopher specializing in theology and philosophy of religion. He is an emeritus professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Faithful Research, and a member of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of twenty books, most recently The Image in Mind; Theism, Naturalism and the Imagination, co-authored with the American artist Jil Evans. He has been a visiting scholar or guest lecturer at a large number of universities, including Brown, Cambridge, Notre Dame, Oxford, Princeton, and the University of Chicago. Since 2013 Taliaferro is editor-in-chief of the journal Open Theology.
The Sovereignty of Good is a book of moral philosophy by Iris Murdoch. First published in 1970, it comprises three previously published papers, all of which were originally delivered as lectures. Murdoch argued against the prevailing consensus in moral philosophy, proposing instead a Platonist approach. The Sovereignty of Good is Murdoch's best known philosophy book.
The Time of the Angels is a philosophical novel by British novelist Iris Murdoch. First published in 1966, it was her tenth novel. The novel centres on Carel Fisher, an eccentric Anglican priest who is the rector of a London church which was destroyed by bombing during World War II. Fisher denies the existence of God and the possibility of human goodness in a post-theistic world. The novel, which has elements of Gothic fiction, received mixed reviews on its publication.
Jordan Howard Sobel was a Canadian-American philosopher specializing in ethics, logic, and decision theory. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, Canada. In addition to his areas of specialization, Sobel made notable contributions in the fields of philosophy of religion, and value theory. Before his death, Sobel was considered by Christian apologist William Lane Craig to be the leading philosophical defender of Atheism prior to Graham Oppy.
Yujin Nagasawa is a Japanese-born British philosopher specialising in the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of mind and applied philosophy.
