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PEAKER PROFILESRyan K. Balot is Professor of Political Science and Classics at the University of Toronto. The author of Greed and Injustice in Classical Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), of Greek Political Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), and of the forthcoming Courage in the Democratic Polis:
Ideology and Critique in Classical Athens (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2014), and editor of A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), Balot specializes in American, early modern, and classical political thought. His current projects include work on Machiavelli‟s republicanism, Aristotle and the mixed regime, and Plato‟s Laws.
Gábor Betegh is Professor of Philosophy at the Central European University. He is the author of Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology and Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 2004, 2007) and the editor with Julia Annas of Cicero’s De Finibus (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). He works on ancient philosophy, primarily on metaphysics, philosophy of nature, and the connections between ancient philosophy and ancient religions. His current book projects include a monograph on ancient conceptions of corporeality and a new edition and commentary of the fragments of Archelaus of Athens, Socrates‟ presumed teacher.
István Bodnár is Associate Professor in the department of Philosophy at Central European University and at ELTE. His main research area is ancient Greek philosophy, science and logic.
György Geréby is Professor in the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University and is currently Keeley Visiting Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. His main areas of interest are: late antique and medieval philosophy and theology, early Christianity, and political theology. Recent publications in English include “Political Theology versus Theological Politics: Erik Peterson and Carl Schmitt”(2008) and“Hidden Themes in Fourteenth-Century Byzantine and Latin Theological
Debates:Monarchianism and Crypto-Dyophysitism.”(2011)
Romain Graziani is Professor in early and medieval Chinese history at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon. His main research areas are the history of Chinese thought, early Taoism, and Chinese politics. Recent publications: Writings of Master Guan. A translation and study of the chapters of the Art of the Mind in the Guanzi (in French) and Visions and Uses of the Body in early Taoism (2011).
Brad Inwood is University Professor of Classics and Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He works mostly on Stoicism, but his most recent book, Ethics After Aristotle (Harvard University Press 2014), deals with later Peripatetic ethics. His current project is “A Sourcebook of Later Stoicism (155 BC to 200 AD)” for Cambridge University Press.
Gábor Kósa earned his PhD in 2006 at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest), where he is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chinese Studies. Recent publications include the following studies: “The „Sea of Fire‟ as a Chinese Manichaean metaphor” [Asia Major24.2 (2011) 1–52]; “Atlas and Splenditenens in the Cosmology Painting.” (2012) “Translating the Eikōn. Some considerations on the relation of the Chinese Cosmology painting to the Eikōn. (2014), “Buddhist Monsters in the Chinese Manichaean “Hymnscroll” and the “Pumen” chapter of the Lotus sutra (2014) His major research interests include Chinese mythology,ancient Chinese “shamanism”, and Chinese Manichaeism.
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Beatrix Mecsi is an art historian with a specialization of East Asian Art. She studied European Art History, Korean and Japanese Studies in Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest. Her research interest includes religious iconography in East Asia, text-image relationships, art theory and
contemporary art. Currently she is a „Samsung associate professor‟ at the Korean Studies Department, Institute of East Asian Studies (ELTE), Budapest.
Emese Mogyoródi is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Szeged, Hungary. Her research interests include Presocratic philosophy, Socrates, Plato‟s ethics and political philosophy and Ancient Greek moral psychology. She has translated into Hungarian and made commentaries to Plato‟s Apology and Euthyphro in the new Plato series by Atlantisz. Her latest book is a collection of essays entitled Achilles and Socrates: Moral Psychology and Political Philosophy from the Archaic to the Classical Age.
Melinda Pap is Assistant Professor at the Chinese Department of ELTE University (Budapest). Her field of research is Chinese Buddhism, with focus on Tiantai philosophy. She wrote her Ph.D.
dissertation about Zhanran(711-782) and his theory of Buddha-nature of the insentient (2011). Her articles include: “Az élettelen tárgyak buddha-természetének bizonyítása Zhanran A gyémántpenge*című művében” [Demonstration of the Buddha-nature of the Insentient in Zhanran‟sDiamond Scalpel
Treatise](2009) and “A buddha-természet fogalmának megjelenése és korai értelmezései a kínai buddhizmusban a lefordított sūtrák és értekezések tükrében” [The Notion of Buddha-Nature and its Early Interpretations in Chinese Buddhism in the Light of Translated Sūtras and Treatises] (2010) István Perczel is Professor of Byzantine and Eastern Christian studies at the Department of Medieval Studies of Central European University Budapest. He specialises in Neoplatonist, Eastern Christian and Byzantine thought,as well as Syriac studies and Indian Christianity. He is directing a project of
digitising and cataloguing the manuscripts of the Indian Syrian Christians,which is the basis for writing the hitherto unknown history of this community. Perczel has also dedicated a number of studies to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and the Origenist tradition, to Symeonthe New Theologian
and the Byzantine mystical tradition and to the history of Indian Christianity. He edited the East Syriac Nomocanon of Abdisho of Nisibis (2005, 2009) and coedited the volume The Eucharist in Theology and Philosophy (2005). He translated Plotinus(1986), John Chrysostom (2002) and Symeon the New Theologian (2000, 2010) into Hungarian. His current projects are the publication of the West Syriac Nomocanon of Gregory Barhebraeus on the basis of its oldest manuscript kept in India (forthcoming 2014) and a monograph entitled “Origénistes ou théosophes? Histoire politiqueet doctrinale
d'un mouvement des Ve-VIe siècles,” in three volumes, first volume forthcoming in 2015.
Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations as well as the Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. His interests are focused on the inter-relations between anthropology, history, religion, and philosophy. He is the author of The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China (Stanford 2001) and To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China (Harvard Asia Center 2002), as well as the co-author, with Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, and Bennett Simon, of Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford 2008).
Pénélope Riboud is Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Civilization at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris. As a historian of Medieval China, she specializes in cultural and religious exchanges between China and Central Asia during the Northern Dynasty, Sui and Tang periods. She is currently working on a political and social history of China under
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Tang dynasty rule, and involved in two research projects, one concerning funerary customs in Dunhuang and Turfan, and the other on the imagery of Hell in ancient and modern China.
Ferenc Ruzsa is Associate Professor of Philosophy at ELTE University, Budapest. His research focuses on Indian philosophy (especially Sākhya and Nyāya–Vaiśeika) and Buddhism. Ruzsa also wrote on Greek-Indian connections in philosophy, logical reconstructions of philosophical arguments and on Indo-Aryan & Dravidian linguistics. His five books and 50+ papers (half of them in Hungarian) are all available online at https://elte.academia.edu/FerencRuzsa
Roel Sterckx is Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History, Science, and Civilization at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare College. Publications include The Animal and the Daemon in Early China (Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 2002); Of Tripod and Palate:
Food, Politics and Religion in Traditional China (New York: MacMillan, 2005); Food,Sacrifice, and
Sagehood in Early China (New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2011), and articles and chapters on the cultural history of pre-imperial and early imperial China. He is currently working on a book tentatively entitled “Thinking through Agriculture in Early China.”
Máté Veres is currently Junior Research Fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaftenvom Menschen, Vienna, and doctoral candidate at the Department of Philosophy, Central European University. He is currently working on a dissertation concerning sceptical arguments and theology in Cicero and Sextus Empiricus, as well as papers concerning related issues in Hellenistic philosophy and its influence.
Curie Virág is Assistant Professor in the department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto and a Humanities Initiative Fellow at the CEU Institute for Advanced Study. An
intellectual historian of early and medieval China, her research has dealt primarily with the history and philosophy of emotions, self-cultivation, and aesthetics in pre-1200 philosophical, religious and literary texts. Recent articles include “The Intelligence of Emotions? Debates over the
Structure of Moral Life in Early China” (forthcoming) and “Self-cultivation as Praxis in Song Neo- Confucianism” (2014). Her current book project is a two-volume study of emotions and
conceptions of the self in early and medieval China.
Robert Wardy is reader in ancient philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St Catharine‟s College. His publications include Aristotle in China: Language, Categories and Translation. His current projects focus on philosophical translation, thought-experimentation and Plato‟s Symposium.
