Bio

Scott O’Leary is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at the University of Saint Mary (Kansas).  He received his PhD from Fordham University in 2011, working on the relation of emotions and moral experience.  This centered on the the reciprocal relation between emotion and value, including the impact of culture on the constitution of value and our emotional capacities and the way emotions can be engines for transformation in various cultures.  He recently received a cluster grant from the University of Notre Dame’s Center for the Philosophy of Religion and the John Templeton Foundation to co-lead an international research group spanning four continents and seven countries on The Role of Emotion in Religious Experience, culminating in a final workshop in Konstanz, Germany in the Summer of 2014.  He is co-editing a special edition of the Journal of Analytic Theology and a separate volume with Pickering and Chatto that gathers together the fruits of this year-long research group.  His current work focuses on the role of awe in religious experience, particularly in Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi meditative practices.