The Philosophy of Fanaticism

Leo Townsend is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna and the principal investigator of a project on group speech and group silencing, funded by the Austrian Science Fund. He works on social epistemology, collective intentionality and speech theory.Ruth Rebecca Tietjen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen and works on a project on antagonistic political emotions, funded by the Austrian Science Fund. She is working on political and existential phenomena such as religious zeal, fanaticism, populism, loneliness, and melancholia.Hans Bernhard Schmid is a professor of Political and Social Philosophy at the University of Vienna. His most recent book is Evil in Joint Action: The Ethics of Hate and the Sociology of Original Sin (Routledge, 2020).Michael Staudigl works as a senior lecturer and researcher at the philosophy department, University of Vienna, and scientific associate at the Research centre for religion and transformation (RaT). Between 2003 and 2010 he was visiting fellow at IWM, Vienna. Among his most important publications is Phänomenologie der Gewalt (2015).