Meet the Speaker: Richard C. Taylor

Richard C. Taylor, Marquette University Philosophy Department professor and member of the De Wulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, has co-taught the KU Leuven graduate course, “Aquinas in Context,” with Prof. Andrea Robiglio of KU Leuven annually since 2011. This course is often linked with a graduate course on Aquinas taught at Marquette through the use live video internet technology.  He has also held a Fulbright teaching and research fellowship for short term courses at Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey, the University of Pisa, Italy, and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Prof. Taylor is also a Cooperating Partner in the Jena University DFG-Research Training Group 2792: Autonomy of Heteronomous Texts in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

His work has ranged from the Greek philosophical tradition and the entré of philosophy into the lands of Islam in the ninth century in the Plotiniana Arabica and the Discourse on the Pure Good (Latin: Liber de causis), through the classical rationalist tradition of al-Farabi, Ibn Sina / Avicenna, and especially Averroes, to the influence of these writings in Latin on the thought of Thomas Aquinas and his teacher Albert the Great in the thirteenth century. He is active as director of the Aquinas and ‘the Arabs’ International Working Group (AquinasAndTheArabs.org) since its inception in 2005 and founding editor of the Brepols series, Philosophy in the Abrahamic Traditions of the Middle Ages. He is past president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, past president the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, and current vice-president of the Société Internationale D’Histoire des Sciences et de la Philosophie Arabes et Islamiques.