The International Academy for Bioethical Inquiry

Biophilosophy starts from the idea that living things have their own worlds and their own integrity. It starts from the idea that living creatures have their own goods and their own experiences that may or may not be accessed by us. Biophilosophy is open to the fact that living creatures can sometimes reveal aspects of their own being to us, even when or even if we do not put them under the scrutiny of the biologist or the philosopher.

It is certainly true that when creatures are placed under scientific scrutiny, we arrive at some correct information about them. But it is also true that they sometimes behave differently under the experimental conditions than they do in the wild. In fact, living creatures placed in experimental conditions often resist our ways of studying them. They sometimes just die under that scrutiny.

Living things have their own integrity and their own ways-of-being that may slip through our ways of thinking about them. So, we take biophilosophy to embody a humble approach to living creatures that crosses many disciplinary boundaries and is found across a wide set of academic practices, including philosophy, biology, ecology, anthropology, anthropology, sociology and theology.

Thus, when engaged in biophilosophy, we need to place ourselves under scrutiny, which will aid us to recognize that living creatures may not conform to our ways of thinking about them, or our ways of experimenting upon them. And in not conforming to our ways of thinking, they also reveal aspects of themselves to us. 

Biophilosophy takes irreducibility as a fact of being and approaches creatures relationally within systems. At its best, biophilosophy dissolves the tension between humanistic idealism and humanistic realism and is open to the agency of living creatures that often resist human intellectual — metaphysical, epistemological, economic, political, ethical — strictures. Biophilosophy seeks to move away from boundaries and limits and toward relationships. Biophilosophy takes seriously that living creatures move and bend and change in response to their environments, and that the human is a factor in their environments, whether in the scientific laboratory or in the environment surrounding them. The subtlety and elegance of living creatures are part of their very being. 

Biophilosophy takes seriously the idea that living things have goods that may escape our own perceptual capacities. Living things have goods that are radically different from human forms of valuation. And if we take this seriously, we might find ourselves receiving insights from living things, opening us beyond the limits of metaphysical or scientific speculation.

Or we might say biophilosophy returns us to older practices of doing philosophy and metaphysics; namely, we humans should always hold propositional claims to truth lightly. That creation is creative; that it has its own motions and plasticity; that our ways of thinking are always perspectival and relative. Biophilosophy, at least now as I mean it recognizes that the goodness of being is tied up with the truth of being, and that the goodness and truth of being are tied up with the beauty of the being, and that this is true for each being that we encounter.

Professor of philosophy and holds the Tenet Endowed Chair in Bioethics at Saint Louis University. His research interests are at the intersection of science and culture, and especially the intersection of culture and technology. He is writing books related to human intuition, and exploring an intuitive approach to biophilosophy, especially around the good of living things. His first book, "The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying" (Notre Dame UP, 2011) was named the most important book published in 2011 by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Religion and Ethics page. His second book, "Biopolitics After Neuroscience: Morality and the Economy of Virtue" (Bloomsbury 2022, coauthored with M. Therese Lysaught and Andrew A. Michel) won the Expanded Reason Award from the Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation. 

Associate professor in theological ethics at the University of Oslo. Her work focuses on child ethics. She is especially interested in how we see and speak about children — from their earliest moments, their moral lives and their deaths. A scholar of moral theology, her research focuses on moral decision-making, medical ethics, and the meaning of the moral life, weaving together theology, philosophy and paediatrics. She is the author of "Befriending the North Wind: Children, Moral Agency, and the Good Death," and "Thinking Theologically About Children." Her research focuses on children’s earliest relationships with the world in and through their mother’s wombs. She holds an undergraduate degree in biochemistry, a master’s in theology, and a Ph.D. in theological ethics from the University of Toronto. She was previously an associate lecturer at the University of St. Andrews and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Lonergan Research Institute at the University of Toronto. Originally from Canada, she lives with her husband and three children in Oslo, Norway. 

Professor of theology at Baylor University, where she is also affiliate faculty in women’s and gender studies and director of the newly-launched Baylor Initiative in Christianity and the Arts. She is the author of four books, most recently "Attunement: The Art and Politics of Feminist Theology," which came out from Oxford University Press in May 2024. She is finishing a manuscript coauthored with Matthew Whelan on poverty and art, and beginning to think about new projects related to creativity, art-making, and spirituality. 

Philosopher on faculty in neurology and bioethics at  Harvard Medical School, where he codirects the Human Network Initiative, and a senior fellow at the think tank Capita. He serves on the  ethics  committee  at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and coleads the Trust and Belonging Initiative at Harvard's Human Flourishing Program. His philosophical work examines the connections between modes of intersubjectivity, cognition and human flourishing, and he is writing a book on belonging and world-making for Yale University Press.  

Hubert Mäder Chair in Health Care Ethics, professor of health care ethics and philosophy, and director of the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University. His research interests include the philosophy of human nature and its application to issues at the margins of life; ethical issues related to end-of-life care, biotechnology, and healthcare allocation; and the philosophical thought of Thomas Aquinas. His publications include "Thomistic Principles and Bioethics," (Routledge, 2006), and "The Nature of Human Persons: Metaphysics and Bioethics," (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020). 

Visiting scholar and part-time lecturer at Boston College. His research interests center around metaphysics, the philosophy of the person, and philosophies of spiritual practice, especially in the 19th- and early 20th-century philosophical-theological tradition of French Spiritualism. He also works on 20th-century Continental philosophy and the phenomenological tradition, notably Levinas, Deleuze, and Blanchot. He is completing a monograph on the French Spiritualist thinker, Félix Ravaisson, Being and Movement (Bloomsbury, forthcoming), editing a book, "French Spiritualism and Continental Philosophy," and has recently coedited "Ravaisson, Fragments on Philosophy and Religion," (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). 

Assistant professor of bioethics at the Ohio State University. His research interests lie in the overlap between empirical biology and philosophy and include animal ethics, human-animal chimeras, and the philosophy of perception. Prior to this appointment, Marty earned his Ph.D. in bioethics and philosophy at Saint Louis University and his M.A. in philosophy at Duquesne University.  

Research fellow at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo, where she is part of the interdisciplinary ECODISTURB research group. She is also an affiliated lecturer in ecotheology at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. Simone's writing is situated at the intersection of critical theology, earth ethics and philosophy. She is the author of "Effort and Grace: On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy," (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), and is completing a second monograph, "Ecologies of Ecstasy: Mysticism, Philosophy and Vegetal Life," forthcoming with Columbia University Press.   

Associate professor of anthropology at the School of Health Humanities of Peking University, with research interests focus on body, everyday life, and medical practices. Lai has done extensive ethnographic and interdisciplinary research in north and southwest China, both rural and urban areas, on health-related issues. Her monographs include "Hygiene, Sociality and Culture in Contemporary Rural China: The Uncanny New Village," (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), and "Gathering Medicines: Nation and Knowledge in China's Mountain South," coauthored with Judith Farquhar (The University of Chicago Press, 2021). Focusing on the entanglement of Chinese medicine and cybernetics in the past and present, her research aims to bring Chinese medicine and its philosophy to the frontline debates around the science and technology development in the increasingly informatic world, in particular the dynamics between the virtual and actual, information and material. 

Professor in the Departments of Pathology, Neurology, and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago, where he also teaches courses on literature, philosophy and theology. He works on the biophysics of protein structure, concentrating on amyloid proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases. He also teaches courses on James Joyce’s Ulysses, St. Thomas Aquinas, Augustine’s City of God, and other authors, particularly Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann. His main theological interest is in the problem of evil, and in this connection, he is completing a book on the philosophical and literary perspectives on disease, "Disease and the Problem of Evil." His interests also center on the impact of biotechnology and the genetic revolution on the definition of human nature. 

Professor of theological bioethics at Baylor University in Texas since August 2023. He is president of the United Kingdome-based Society for the Study of Christian Ethics (2022-24) and an ordained minister of the United Reformed Church in the UK. He began an academic career in the biosciences with a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Cambridge. His research interests include intersections of theology, ethics, the biosciences, health care and theological neuroethics. He is part of a collaborative project on evolution, animal suffering, and the theological problem of evil. His publications include "Theological Neuroethics: Christian Ethics Meets the Science of the Human Brain," (Bloomsbury, 2017) and "Science in Theology: Encounters between Science and the Christian Tradition," (Bloomsbury, 2020).  

Associate professor of environmental studies and philosophy and an associate member of the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at University of Oregon. His work provides an analysis of the ways in which natural sciences inform conservation debates and how current biotechnologies are altering traditional conceptions of (human) nature. Nicolae can be reached at nmorar@uoregon.edu.

Studied at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and has been Van Mildert Professor of Divinity at Durham University in the UK since 2015. Former chair of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham. His research and teaching focus on the doctrine of creation, metaphysics, and the thought of Thomas Aquinas. His first book, "Philosophy, God and Motion, ' (Routledge 2005/ 2013) explored a genealogy of the concept of motion in theology, philosophy and the history of science. He has published "Creation: A Guide for the Perplexed," (2017) and his next monograph is "Given Life: from Phenomenology to Theology." From 2021 to 2023, Simon ran a Templeton-funded project entitled ‘Theology and the Phenomenology of Life’. Simon is also an Anglican priest and residentiary Canon of Durham Cathedral.  

Senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Dundee. Before arriving at Dundee, she taught and researched at the University of Kassel and the University of Innsbruck. Her research focuses on process ontology, dynamic modes of thinking in phenomenology and the sciences as well as ancient Greek philosophy. She is the author of "Dynamic Realism, Uncovering the reality of Becoming," (2021) as well as "Physis als bewegte Existenz – Eine Ontologie des Konkreten," (2016) and coedited "Perspektiven der Metaphysik," with Paola-Ludovika Coriando (2014). Her articles have appeared in numerous scholarly publications.  

Associate professor of bioethics and religion at Baylor University and adjunct associate professor of bioethics at the Baylor College of Medicine. She specializes in disability theology, bioethics and the visual arts within medicine. Stahl is trained as a hospital chaplain and works as a clinical ethicist consultant. Her latest book, "Disability’s Challenge to Theology: Genes, Eugenics, and the Metaphysics of Modern Medicine," (Notre Dame Press) develops a Christian response to genetic technologies using the insights of disability scholars.  

President of the Chateau Saint André Center (www.chauteausaintandre.center), located in the south of France. He is a native of The Netherlands where he studied medicine (MMedS) and law (J.D.), both at Maastricht University, and philosophy (M.A.), philosophy of the humanities (M.A.) and health care ethics (Ph.D.), all at the Radboud University Nijmegen. A Fulbright grant enabled him to study at Loyola University Chicago in 1988. In the subsequent decades he taught at a dozen universities in the Netherlands, Italy, France, and the United States, most recently as eean of the liberal arts honors college of Maastricht University, Netherlands (2020-2022). He continues to serve as professor of interdisciplinary normative science at the latter university, and as professor emeritus of medical humanities at Creighton University’s School of Medicine in Omaha, Nebraska.