Project Team
Project Directors
John R. Betz, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He has long had an interest in the work of Schelling, having begun his graduate studies in Tübingen, Germany, where Schelling also lived and studied. His first publication was an article on Schelling that appeared in 2003 in the Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, entitled “Schelling in Rosenzweigs Stern der Erlösung.” After studying again in Tübingen on a Fulbright scholarship to study J. G. Hamann, a considerable influence on Schelling, he received his PhD from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia in 1999. Since then his work in philosophical and systematic theology has been dedicated to philosophical and theological metaphysics and the recovery, translation, and interpretation of major works of the German philosophical and theological tradition. He is the author of After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J.G. Hamann (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), the editor and co-translator of the English edition of Erich Przywara’s Analogia Entis (2014), co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Apophatic Theology, and a regular contributor to Modern Theology. Betz will work on the translation and the historical-critical introduction.
Marcela García-Romero, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University, and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. Born and raised in Mexico City, she received her B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Navarre, Spain, and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the LMU in Munich. Among the many reasons for her involvement in the project is that, while in Munich, she collaborated on the historical-critical edition of Schelling’s works undertaken by the Bavarian Academy of the Sciences and Humanities. Professor García-Romero's work centers on two main areas of philosophy. One is German idealism, particularly the philosophy of the late Schelling and discussions regarding reality, life, human activity, freedom, and the limits of reason. The other is ontology, specifically discussions about what it is to be and to exist, and the degree to which our concepts can grasp actual being. Professor García-Romero has published extensively on these topics in German, English and Spanish. She is a member of the editorial board of the academic journal Philosophisches Jahrbuch and, importantly for our project, a member of the executive committee of the North American Schelling Society. She is one of the leading experts on Schelling today, and is currently working on a book entitled, The Crisis of Pure Reason. The Pursuit of Actuality in Schelling’s Late Philosophy. Aside from her general counsel throughout the project, and help arranging access to the relevant manuscripts in Munich, she will be involved chiefly with the annotations.
Contributing Scholars
Kyla Bruff is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Memorial University. Her work primarily investigates the metaphysical commitments of political positions, and the relevance of classical German philosophy for politics today. She is also a feminist and frequently lends a critical voice to political and ecological issues—especially those facing Newfoundland and Labrador. Kyla speaks and works in English, French and German. Many of her publications trace the interactions and resonances between 19th and 20th century German and French philosophy. As the Treasurer and Webmaster of the North American Schelling Society, she will be advertising and promoting the project on the society’s website and updating it, as work progresses, with drafts of the translation work both for general preview and for the sake of generating broader public discussion (and possibly valuable suggestions) about the translation itself.
Justin Shaun Coyle, Ph.D. recently completed his degree in historical theology with a dissertation on medieval Trinitarian theology and aesthetics, themes that also animate much of Schelling’s thought. Coyle just published a review of an important work on Schelling in the journal Pro Ecclesia (see appendix) and is currently writing an essay on early subjective idealism in Catholic theology for the Oxford History of Modern German Theology (forthcoming with Oxford University Press). Because Schelling writes not only in German but includes notes on figures in Church history in their original Greek and Latin, Dr. Coyle’s expertise in historical theology (Greek and Latin, patristic and medieval) makes him an ideal research associate. In addition to working on the translation with Betz and Wood, he will therefore be working on the annotations concerning patristic and medieval sources.
Hadi Fakoury is a doctoral student at McGill University in Montreal, where he is currently completing his dissertation on Schelling’s treatise on Monotheism (Sämtliche Werke II:2, 1-131). His dissertation offers a complete translation of that work, as well as a comparative table indicating parallels between the Monotheism lectures and the body of Schelling’s post-1827 writings, including his Nachschriften. He has also translated Schelling’s Exposition of Philosophical Empiricism, which he plans to submit for publication in the next issue of the journal Kabiri. Given this expertise, he will be reviewing and annotating the passages in the Urfassung corresponding to the Exposition of Philosophical Empiricism and the Monotheism. Given his experience as a coordinator of a recent, international conference on F.H. Jacobi at McGill University this past September, he will also be the coordinator of the international conference on Schelling that we plan to hold at the University of Notre Dame upon the project’s completion, and an editor of the conference volume.
Sean J. McGrath, Ph.D. is Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University in Newfoundland, and Visiting Professor at McGill University in Montreal. He researches and teaches in the areas of metaphysics, classical German philosophy (Kant to Heidegger), phenomenology and hermeneutics, and psychoanalysis. After graduate work at the University of Toronto in both theology and philosophy, he graduated in 2002 with a dissertation in philosophy supervised by Graeme Nicholson, later published as The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (Catholic University of America Press, 2006, reprinted 2013). In 2008 he published a second book, Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Eerdmans), which was commissioned by the Centre for Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. That same year he was awarded a Humboldt Fellowship for two years of research in Germany on the topic of the historical and systematic connections between psychoanalysis and German Idealism. The fruit of that research was published in 2012 as The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (Routledge). He is the co-editor of A Companion to Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life (Rodopi, 2010) and the editor of Analecta Hermeneutica, an annual journal on philosophical hermeneutics and related fields. He serves as the co-chair of the North American Schelling Society (which he founded with Jason Wirth in 2011) and a member of the executive committee of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy. Given his expertise, McGrath will be involved with all aspects of the project.
Thomas Pfau, Ph.D., a native of Germany, is the Mary Alice Baldwin Professor is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English, with secondary appointments in Germanic Language & Literatures and the Divinity School at Duke University. He has published some forty-five essays on literary and philosophical subjects ranging from the 18th through the early 20th century. In addition to two translations, of Hölderlin and Schelling (SUNY Press, 1987 and 1994), he has also edited seven essay collections and special journal issues and is the author of three monographs: Wordsworth’s Profession (Stanford, 1997), Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, Melancholy, 1790-1840 (Johns Hopkins, 2005), and Minding the Modern: Intellectual Traditions, Human Agency, and Responsible Knowledge (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013). Given his expertise in Schelling and his skill as a translator of Schelling, Pfau will be a consultant on the project as a whole.
Jordan Daniel Wood, Ph.D. completed his degree in historical theology at Boston College with a dissertation on the relation between creation and Christology in Maximus the Confessor, which are themes and connections that recur in Schelling’s text. Wood is also writing an essay on Schelling’s influence on Catholic theology for the Oxford History of Modern German Theology (forthcoming with Oxford University Press). Because Schelling writes not only in German but includes notes on figures in Church history in their original Greek and Latin, Dr. Wood’s expertise in historical theology, both patristic and medieval, makes him ideal research associate. In addition to working on the translation, he will also be working on the annotations related to patristic and medieval references.