The Centre is delighted to welcome a range of distinguished speakers for its inaugural conference.

Jonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, member of the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy. Professor Lear is a philosopher and psychoanalyst working on issues that arise at teh intersection of the two disciplines. He writes on the concept of life, on courage, irony, happiness, shame, love. His work engages with Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Wittgenstein and Freud.

His books include, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (CUP 1988), Love and Its Place in Nature (Faber and Faber 1992), Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Harvard University Press 1998), Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life (Harvard University Press 2000), Freud (Routledge 2005).

His most recent book, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Harvard University Press) analyses the idea of the death of a culture and the possibility of hope. Lear discusses the fate of the Crow tribe of the western US who were forced to give up their way of life and enter a reservation.

For an article on the latest instalment of the Freud wars

Alexander Garcia Duttmann is Professor of Philosophy and Visual Culture at Goldmith's, University of London. Professor Duttmann writes on friendship, irony, trust, truth, morality, and art (film, opera, photography). In his writing, he engages with the work of Adorno, Derrida, heidegger. He is a philosopher and opera librettist, most recently workin in collaboration with the photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg in Liebeslied/My Suicides (ICA 2000).

His books include That's It: A Philosophical Commentary on Adorno's Minima Moralia (Suhrkamp 2004), Erase the traces (Diaphanes 2004), Philosophy of Exaggeration (Continuum 2002), Between Cultures. Tension in the Struggle for Recognition (Verso 2000), At Odds with Aids (Stanford 1997).

His most recent book, Visconti: Insights of Flesh and Blood (Stanford) explores Luchino Visconti's films in light of Adorno's idea that it is never the real but always the possible that blocks the path to utopia.

Kendall L. Walton is Charles L. Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Philosophy, University of Michigan and Professor at the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. He is the author of the extremely influential Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Harvard University Press, 1990). Professor Walton writes on depiction, imagination, metaphor, representation, and the emotions. His work on fiction, photography and the aesthetics of music is shaped by concerns in metaphysics, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.

Forthcoming collections of his essays include: Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts and In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence

Drafts of current work on style and on photography can be found on http://sitemaker.umich.edu/klwalton/home

Other online material includes important early research on make-believe http://sitemaker.umich.edu/klwalton/my_first_research_on_make-believe_%E2%80%A6

Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He was formerly Reader in English Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland (1992-9), and Associate Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Tampere, Finland (1989-92). He has published many essays and is author of numerous books, including:

How to Read Shakespeare. London: Granta, 2005; An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. Third edition. London and New York: Pearson, 2004. Co-author (with Andrew Bennett); Jacques Derrida. London and New York: Routledge, 2003; The Uncanny. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press/Routledge, 2003; E.M. Forster. Writers and Their Work, New Series. Plymouth: British Council/Northcote House, 1999; After Derrida. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995; Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives. London and New York: Macmillan/St Martin's Press, 1995. Co-author (with Andrew Bennett); Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

Prof Royle is also editor of Deconstructions: A User's Guide (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000) and joint editor of the Oxford Literary Review.

Paul Davies works on Kantian and post-Kantian European Philosophy; Phenomenology; Aesthetics; Philosophy of Literature and Philosophy of Religion.

Recent publications include: 'Asymmetry and Transcendence: On Scepticism and 1st Philosophy' in Research in Phenomenology, Vol.35, 2006; 'Withholding Evidence: Phenomenology and Secrecy' in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Vol VI, 2007, 'This Contradiction' in Futures (ed. Richard Rand) Stanford University Press, 2001. 'Kant's Joke: On continuing to use the word "God"' in The Matter of Critique: Readings in Kant's Philosophy (eds Andrea Rehberg and Rachel Jones), Manchester, Clinamen Press, 2000) 'From Constructive Philosophy to Philosophical Quietism' in Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology (JBSP), Vol, 2000 (along with Mcdowell's response). 'Sincerity and the End of Theodicy: Three Remarks on Kant and Levinas' in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (eds Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley), CUP, 2002; 'Kafka's Lesson, Blanchot's Itinerary' in Parallax, Vol 39, 2006; 'A Poem and Its Context' in Textual Practice, Summer 2008.

Stephen Mulhall works on Wittgenstein, Post-Kantian Philosophy (especially Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger), Post-Analytic Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy of Religion

Publications include: 1990 On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (Routledge); 1992 Liberals and Communitarians (Blackwell) - with Adam Swift; 1994 Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary (OUP); 1994 Faith and Reason (Duckworth); 1996 Heidegger and Being and Time (Routledge); 1996 The Cavell Reader (Blackwell) - editor; 2001 Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (OUP); 2002 On Film (Routledge); 2005 Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton); 2006 Martin Heidegger: International Library of Essays in the History of Social and Political Thought (Ashgate) - editor; 2006 Wittgenstein' Private Language (OUP); 2007 The Conversation of Humanity (University of Virginia Press)

Kathleen Stock

My current focus of interest is a range of questions raised by imagination and its involvement in our engagement with fiction and art. More generally, I am interested in Aesthetics, and especially philosophical issues raised by fiction and music. As well as short articles, I'm writing a monograph on imagining in relation to fiction, and I'm also editing, with Katherine Thomson-Jones, New Waves in Aesthetics: a collection of new writing in Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). I am particularly interested in supervising or co-supervising research students working in the following areas: the imagination, either generally, or particularly in conjunction with fiction and the arts; the philosophy of film; issues in Aesthetics generally.

Publications include :

Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning and Work (Oxford University Press, 2007). Contributors include Tamara Balter, Paul Boghossian, Stephen Davies, Julian Dodd, Gordon Graham, Derek Matravers, Michael Morris, Aaron Ridley, Jenefer Robinson, Roger Scruton, and Eddy Zemach.

http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199213344

• 'Sartre, Wittgenstein and learning from imagination' in P. Goldie and E. Schellekens, Philosophy and Conceptual Art (Oxford University Press, 2007).
• 'Fiction and Psychological Insight', in Matthew Kieran and Dominic Lopes (eds.) Knowing Art (Philosophical Studies series, Springer, 2006). LINK
• 'Thoughts on the 'paradox' of fiction', Guest Contribution to the Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2006 LINK
• 'Resisting Imaginative Resistance', Philosophical Quarterly,Vol. 5:221, October 2005. LINK
• 'On Davies' Argument from Relational Properties' Acta Analytica, Vol. 20:4, 2005 (37).
• 'The Tower of Goldbach and Other Impossible Tales' in Matthew Kieran and Dominic Lopes (eds.) Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts (Routledge, 2003).
• 'Historical Definitions of Art' in Stephen Davies and Ananta Sukla (eds.) Art and Essence (Praeger, 2003).
• 'Some Objections to Stecker's Historical Functionalism' British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol.40, No. 4 (2000).

These are courses being taught in the current academic year.