Arthur Cools' teaching and research are situated in two domains of philosophy. One domain is the history of philosophy. His expertise concerns in particular (post-)Hegelian philosophy and the philosophy of the 20th century (continental tradition). He is interested in phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophy, critical theory in the tradition of the Frankfurter Schule, post-structuralist theory and post-modernism. The other field is contemporary philosophy of art and culture. Arthur Cools defends an embodied conception of culture and, from this perspective, deals with various topical themes. In his research, he focuses more specifically on narrative imagination, the cognitive relevance of literary fiction, the representation theory of art and its critics, image theories and the transformation of the image experience in a digital culture.

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Hugh Desmond is a philosopher of science and a moral philosopher. He mainly researches the foundations and the ethical implications of the theory of evolution. How should we understand human nature after Darwin? To what extent should we or should we not improve that nature? Why is the human species so 'successful' compared to other apes? Why do non-human animals deserve respect? These and other questions are at the center of Desmond's research interests. From this study of human nature Desmond approaches a range of topics. He is particularly interested in the social structures and ethical values of science. For example: once we hoped to obtain more excellence by increasing competition between scientists, as between companies in the free market. However, fraud and misconduct also seem to be undesirable consequences. Today, there are many factors that seem to jeopardize trust in science. What does it mean to have confidence in science and scientists?

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Herbert De Vriese is professor at the Centre for European Philosophy. In 2011, he obtained his PhD at the University of Antwerp with a thesis on Young Hegelianism, the movement that gave a practical twist to Hegel's philosophy. His central research interest concerns the transformation of Western philosophy in the transition between Hegel and Nietzsche, the so-called 'revolutionary break' in nineteenth-century philosophy. In a broader perspective, he investigates the connection between the history of philosophy and the history of culture and studies philosophical analyses of modern European culture. In that context, his main expertise lies in a critical study of the discourse on secularization and disenchantment. Herbert De Vriese teaches metaphysics, introduction to western philosophy and seminars on cultural philosophy themes. Before his appointment in Antwerp, he was guest lecturer at the universities of Leiden and Eindhoven. The focus of his public philosophy engagement is on activities for the Month of Philosophy.

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Kristien Hens is a research professor in bioethics. She teaches bioethics and media ethics. She researches questions of reproductive ethics, ethics of psychiatry, disability studies, animal ethics and environmental ethics, and more specifically how concepts of biology influence ethical questions. She likes to use empirical research methods. These can be qualitative methods such as interview studies, but also quantitative studies such as vignette studies, which are common within experimental philosophy. She also draws inspiration from the broader field of Health Humanities. Furthermore, she reflects on the relationship between philosophy of medicine, philosophy of biology and bioethics and on the place of the bioethicist within medical science projects.

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Willem Lemmens (1963) is professor of Modern Philosophy and Ethics at the Department of Philosophy. In 1997 he obtained his PhD at the Higher Institute for Philosophy of the KULeuven with a thesis on the ethics of David Hume. From 1998 to 2000 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the FWO. Willem Lemmens' research focuses on the history of modern philosophy (Hume and Spinoza), the influence of Enlightenment thinking on contemporary ethics and political philosophy, the relationship between morality and religion and between law and ethics. From 2012 to 2018 he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Hume Society, and from 2004 to 2018 he served on the Advisory Committee on Bioethics of Belgium. In the social debates on abortion, fertility medicine and euthanasia, he regularly calls for more reflection based on a concern for preserving a traditional vision of human dignity.

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Bert Leuridan is a naturalistic philosopher of science with an interest in metaphysics, logic and analytical philosophy more broadly construed. His research is mainly situated in philosophy of the special sciences. His most central topic of investigation is causation. He has studied causation both from a metaphysical (what is causation?) and an epistemological (how to discover causal relations) point of view. This has led him to related subjects such as complex-systems mechanisms, scientific laws, scientific explanation, the nature of scientific experiments, causal discovery using causal Bayes nets, evidence and statistics. Bert Leuridan has applied his views to, or drawn inspiration from, several special sciences and scientific disciplines, including (classical) genetics, political science and the social sciences in general, historiography, ecology, etc.

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Judith Martens is interested in philosophy of action, social ontology and cognitive science. She works on an interdisciplinary and empirically grounded philosophy of action and sociality. From the cognitive sciences, she is inspired by research into 'minimal' and fragmented forms of cognition. This includes research into implicit cognition, heuristics, habits and skills. All these forms of cognition usually function well, but they can also mislead us and lead us to irrationality. The philosophical puzzle is as follows: how can we preserve rationality as a normative criterion for action, given all the facets, fragmentation and complexity of human thought and action? She looks at both the actions of individuals and groups.

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Erik Myin publishes on philosophical psychology in philosophical and scientific journals. Together with Dan Hutto, he wrote two books, Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content, and Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content, published in 2013 and 2017. In his publications, Erik Myin argues that the mental is thoroughly determined by the history of interactions of persons and their environment. Embodied activities of organisms and persons form the basis for the mental. The world is not in our heads, but our heads are in the world and the human world is always social. He is currently working on two introductory book manuscripts on philosophical psychology and plans to write about logic in the future.

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Bence Nanay's books include Between Perception and Action (Oxford University Press, 2013), Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (Oxford University Press, 2016), Aesthetics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2019), Aesthetic Life (Oxford University Press, with Dom Lopes and Nick Riggle, 2022), Mental Imagery (Oxford University press, 2022), The Fragmented Mind (W. W. Norton, 2023), Global Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2024), The Philosophy of Robert Musil (Oxford University Press, 2025). He is also the author of more than 130 articles on philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology and aesthetics. He is now running a 2 million Euro ERC Consolidator Grant on mental imagery and a 1 million Euro GOA grant on implicit bias.

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Peter Reynaert specialised in Husserlian phenomenology and in the broader phenomenological tradition (Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Henry and others). In his research he concentrates on a central theme in contemporary philosophy of mind/phenomenology, namely the problem of the status of the mental (distinction phenomenological/psychological consciousness), the discussion of dualism/materialism, the nature of contemporary (anti-)naturalism in relation to consciousness, the analysis of intentionality as a characteristic of consciousness, and the relationship of these topics to historical and contemporary phenomenological philosophy.

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Katrien Schaubroeck teaches ethics, feminist philosophy and contemporary analytical philosophy. Her research is also situated within these three domains with a special interest in the philosophy of love, born out of a love for philosophy.

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Geert Van Eekert lectures on and researches themes from the fields of metaphysics, ethics and political philosophy. He works with colleagues at the Centre for European Philosophy on the question of the status of metaphysics after the so-called 'end of metaphysics' and on the theme of metaphysical desire. In the moral, political and religious philosophical oeuvre of Immanuel Kant, he examines the tension between critical ethics and moral anthropology: to what extent is Kant's concept of moral (rational) action a concept on a human scale? More recently, he has been studying the work of Hannah Arendt, exploring themes such as the relationship between philosophy and political action, freedom and citizenship, uprooting and migration, dispossession and the climate crisis, responsibility and the banality of evil, promise and forgiveness, and identity and memory. He was or is the supervisor of research projects on Kant, Stirner, Heidegger and Arendt.

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Walter Van Herck obtained his PhD in Philosophy in 1996 (HIW, KU Leuven). Between 1989 and 2004, he combined a part-time appointment at the University of Antwerp with a part-time appointment at  KdG college. Within the University of Antwerp, he is involved on the one hand at the Pieter Gillis Center, where he teaches a course on world views, and on the other hand at the Philosophy Department, where he mainly teaches courses on philosophy of religion. He is editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Philosophy and Theology (Routledge). Together with colleagues, he translated work of David Hume and Immanuel Kant and edited several collections on philosophy of religion and related subjects.

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Luc Van Liedekerke is a professor of business ethics at the University of Antwerp and the KULeuven. His research focuses on business ethics, sustainable entrepreneurship and financial ethics, and is often carried out in cooperation with private partners in the form of chairs.

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Karim Zahidi is a philosopher and mathematician. His research interests are situated in the fields of philosophical psychology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mathematics and political philosophy. Within philosophical psychology, his focus is on the relationship between subject and environment in cognition. He is also interested in the question to what extent the human mind can be fitted into a naturalistic world view. Within the philosophy of science, his research concentrates on the question of what scientific explanations are and what role mathematics plays in scientific explanations. Within the philosophy of mathematics, his research focuses on the role of mathematical proofs. Within political philosophy, his focus is on Marxism and post-Marxism. Besides his academic work, Karim Zahidi is active in civil society as chairman of the Frans Masereel Fund and member of the editorial board of the socially critical magazine LAVA.

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