Antonio M. Battro, the founder and first president of the Centro de Investigaciones Filosóficas (a private research center) in Buenos Aires, is a partner in the Buenos Aries-based educational consulting firm of Battro and Denham, which specializes in the use of computers to spur cognitive development in children and people with brain injuries. A native of Argentina, he earned a medical degree at the University of Buenos Aries and, after working as a hospital clinician for several years, a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the Sorbonne in 1961. He went on to do postgraduate work in mathematical logic at the University of Fribourg, and later he became of member of the International Center of Genetic Epistemology directed by Jean Piaget at the University of Geneva. He also took a doctorate in medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. Dr. Battro began his research career as a staff scientist at Argentina’s National Center for Science and Technology, and in 1972, as a Fulbright Fellow working with city planner Kevin Lynch at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he served as co-director of a UNESCO project in Salta, Argentina, that studied the capacity of children and young people to document and analyze resources and risks in an urban environment. In 1979, he was appointed an associate director at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in the Laboratory of Experimental and Comparative Psychology in Paris. He has been a visiting professor at Brazilian universities in Araraquara, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, and Curitiba, a visiting research fellow at the World Center for Computing in Paris, a visiting scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a scholar-in-residence at the Ross School, a private elementary and secondary school in East Hampton, New York, and the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard University. The recipient of a Leonard Nelson Foundation grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship for neuroscience research at New York Medical College, and an Eisenhower Fellowship for research in human cognition at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Battro has been awarded prizes for his work by the Argentinean Ministry of Education and various private foundations and organizations. He is a former director of the National Foundation of the Arts in Argentina and a member of the Argentinean National Academy of Education and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The author of some seventy articles published in academic journals, he is the co-author of three books, including (with P.J. Denham) La Educación Digital (1997), and the author of six others. His most recent book, Half a Brain Is Enough: The Story of Nico, was published in 2001 by Cambridge University Press. It is at once the case history of a boy who had the right half of his brain surgically removed to control intractable epilepsy and a meditation on consciousness.

Professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Padua, Enrico Berti specializes in Greek philosophy and has traced the influence of Aristotelian thought on the development of Western philosophy from Plato’s metaphysics to, in particular, the work of Jacques Maritain. He is a graduate of Padua, where he did both his undergraduate and graduate studies, earning a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1963. Dr. Berti began his teaching career at his alma mater, and in 1964, he accepted a professorship in the history of ancient philosophy at the University of Perugia. Named to the chair in ancient philosophy in 1969, he accepted his current post at Padua in 1971. Dr. Berti has been a visiting professor at the University of Geneva and the Free University of Brussels. A recipient of the Nietzsche Prize for Philosophy, he is a past president of the Italian Philosophical Society and currently serves as vice president of the International Federation of Philosophy Societies. He is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. In addition to numerous articles in academic journals, he is the co-author (with Franco Volpi) of a three-volume History of Philosophy (1991) and the author of fourteen other books, including several widely-respected studies of Aristotle in addition to Scientific Reason and Philosophic Reason in Modern Thought (1977), Introduction to Metaphysics (1993), and, most recently, Practical Philosophy, which was Philosophy published by Guida in 2004.

Jürgen Mittelstrass is a professor of philosophy at the University of Konstanz where he has directed the Center for the Philosophy of Science for the past sixteen years. A graduate of the Friedrich-Alexander University at Erlangen-Nürnberg, where he earned his baccalaureate degree with first class honors and took a Ph.D. in philosophy summa cum laude in 1961, he also studied at the universities of Hamburg and Bonn and did postgraduate work at Oxford University. Dr. Mittelstrass began his teaching career as an assistant professor at Erlangen in 1962 and eight years later accepted his present professorship at Konstanz. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Kiel, Temple University in Philadelphia, and the University of Salzburg, as well as a visiting fellow at the Center for the Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. His wide-ranging research interests include epistemology, the philosophy and the history of science, ethics in science, and the philosophy of language and of culture. The recipient of the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Society, the Arthur Burkhardt Prize given by the Arthur Burkhardt Foundation, the Lorenz Oken Medal of the Society of German Scientists and Physicians, the Margrit Engér- Foundation Prize, the Werner Heisenberg Medal of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Order of Merit of the State of Berlin, and the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, he has been awarded honorary degrees from the University of Pittsburgh, Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Iasi in Romania, the University of Tartu in Estonia, and the Technical University of Berlin. Dr. Mittelstrass currently serves as chairman of the Austrian Science Council and president of the Academie Europaea. Formerly the president of the German Philosophical Association and a member of the senate of the German Research Society, he has been a member of the German Chancellor’s Council for Research, Technology, and Innovation and is a founding member of the German-American Academic Council, as well as a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He is a corresponding member of the Académie Internationale d’Historie des Sciences and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In addition to numerous articles published in academic journals, he is the editor of a four volume encyclopedia of science, the co-author of four books, and the author of nineteen others published in German. His Mind, Brain, Behavior: The Mind-Body Problem and the Philosophy of Psychology (Walter De Gruyter, 1989), which was co-authored with Martin Carrier, was published in English in 1991 to widespread acclaim.

The chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo is also a professor of the history of philosophy at the Libera Università Maria SS. Assunta in Rome. He was consecrated titular bishop of Forum Novum in 2001 and appointed an official of the Roman Curia the same year. A native of Argentina, where he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1968, Msgr. Sánchez Sorondo received his undergraduate degree with highest honors from the University of Perugia and a Ph.D. in sacred theology summa cum laude from St. Thomas Aquinas University of Rome in 1974. He was a lecturer in the history of philosophy at Rome’s Lateran University from 1976 to 1982 when he was named a full professor. He also served as dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Lateran for nearly a decade. Named chancellor of the two pontifical academies by Pope John Paul II in 1998, the same year he received his current academic appointment, the late pope appointed him secretary prelate of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas in 1999. Msgr. Sánchez Sorondo’s early research centered on questions related to the participation of human beings in the divine nature in the work of Aquinas. Later his studies concentrated on Aristotle and on the interpretation of Aristotle’s thought by St. Thomas, Hegel, and Paul Ricoeur, especially focusing on "realized freedom" as a hermeneutical criterion for studying history, religion, and culture. A Cavaliere di Gran Croce, his many honors include the Francesco Vito Prize awarded by the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, the Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur, Chili’s Neruda Award, and Brazil’s Decoration Grão Mestre da Ordem de Rio Branco. In addition to articles published in academic journals and essays in volumes of collected works, he is the editor or co-editor of six volumes and the author of six books on theology and philosophy, including La gracia como partisipación de la naturaleza divina (Salamanca, 1980) and Aristóteles y Hegel (Herder, 1987).