Florian Cova is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Geneva’s Philosophy Department and Swiss Center for Affective Sciences. He works at the intersection of philosophy and psychology and has investigated how non-experts think about various philosophical issues: intentional action, morality, free will, aesthetics, and the good life. He coordinated the Xphi Replicability Project, an international collaboration aiming at assessing the replicability of experimental philosophy. He is currently in charge of a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation on the role of emotions in the experience of meaning of life. He has co-edited Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2018) and is the author of various papers, such as: ‘Moral responsibility and free will: A meta-analysis’ (in Consciousness and Cognition), ‘Being Moved’ (in Philosophical Studies), ‘De Pulchritudine non est Disputandum? A cross‐cultural investigation of the alleged intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgment’ (in Mind & Language). For more information about the speaker, click here.
 

Rebecca Empson is Professor of Anthropology at University College London (UCL). Her work focuses on the intersection of forms of ownership, kinship, and material culture. She is the author of Life in the Gap: Subjective Lives and Economic Transformations in Mongolia (UCL Press, 2020) and Harnessing Fortune: Personhood, Memory and Place in Mongolia (2011, Oxford University Press). She is also the editor of Visions of the Future: Time, Causality and Prophecy in the Mongolian Cultural Region (Global Oriental, 2006). She has recently completed a large ERC-funded project that explored economic subjectivities and forms of financialization in Mongolia. She is currently developing a project on Baltic democracies, building on previous sea-based research in Southern England. For more information about the speaker, click here.

Rick Repetti is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York (CUNY), Kingsborough Community College. Member of the Board of Directors of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (APPA). APPA-Certified Philosophical Counselor, Certified Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Practitioner, Certified Mindfulness Practitioner, Trained in Gestalt Psychotherapy. Multiple-decades Meditation and Yoga practitioner and instructor. His research is primarily on meditation and free will, and how meditation increases our agency while transforming our sense of self. He is the author of Buddhism, Meditation, and Free Will: A Buddhist Theory of Mental Freedom (Routledge 2019) and of The Counterfactual Theory of Free Will: A Genuinely Deterministic Theory of Soft Determinism (Lambert 2010). He is also the editor of The Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation (Routledge, 2022) and Buddhist Perspectives on Free Will: Agentless Agency? (Routledge, 2017). His greatest joys revolve around ‘philosophy to the people’: practices that bring the tools of philosophical practice to the general public, such as philosophical counseling, philosophical fellowship, philosophy cafés and podcasts, philosophical tabling events (‘Ask a Philosopher’ booths in public spaces), leading public meditations, etc. He is co-founder and Chief Philosophy Officer (CPO) of a tech start-up company developing a decentralized validated knowledge repository on the blockchain, intended to provide an alternative to Big Tech’s centralized information networks, biased journalism, and other forms of misinformation: Knowledgecoin.io. For more information about the speaker, click here.