Alexander Guerrero, David Van Reybrouck, & Roger Berkowitz

Alexander Guerrero is Henry Rutgers Term Chair and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University.  Professor Guerrero specializes in political philosophy, ethics, legal philosophy, and epistemology.  He has published on a variety of topics in these areas, including the ethics of political representatives, using people merely as a means, decision-making under moral uncertainty, legal ethics, and moral responsibility. He is writing a book, The Lottocratic Alternative, arguing that political representatives should be chosen by lottery.  He created and oversees an ongoing MOOC through the Coursera platform, “Revolutionary Ideas: An Introduction to Legal and Political Philosophy,” which has been taken by more than 100,000 students.  He is co-editing the Norton Introduction to Ethics, scheduled to be published in 2019.  Professor Guerrero attended Harvard College and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Philosophy.  He completed his PhD in Philosophy from New York University and his JD from New York University School of Law.  While a law student, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the New York University Law Review.  After graduation from law school, he served as judicial law clerk to the Honorable Marjorie O. Rendell on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.  Prior to coming to Rutgers in 2016, Professor Guerrero taught at the University of Pennsylvania.  He has taught Introduction to Philosophy, Philosophy of Death and Dying, Ethics, Philosophy of Law, and graduate seminars on Expertise, Ethics, and Democracy and Epistemology.  He has also taught in various prisons and correctional facilities over the past 15 years, and continues to be active in prison education and prison reform.

David Van Reybrouck  is a journalist, a writer of literary non-fiction, a poet and a playwright. He made his debut in 2001 with the award-winning The plague. His greatest success is Congo, a History, for which he received a slew of national and international prizes including the Libris History Prize 2010, the Jan Greshoff Prize 2010 and the AKO Literature Prize 2010. The book was a runaway success in Germany, France and Norway and was translated into many languages. A Plea for Populism won him the Jan Hanlo Essay Prize 2009 and the Flemish Cultural Prize for Criticism and the Essay 2009. 2013 saw the publication of Against Elections, an urgent call for the reform of democracy, which has been sold to seventeen territories to date. In March 2016 Zinc was the official ‘Dutch Book Week 2016’ essay and the successful monologue for theatre Para was published in the same year. In 2017 David wrote with Mohamed El Bachiri A Jihad for Love which became an immediate bestseller and will be published in English, French and German. His latest work is Peace can be taught that he wrote with Thomas D’Ansembourg.

Roger Berkowitz | Founder/Director, Hannah Arendt Center, Partner of Live Ideas 2018: Radical Vision

Roger Berkowitz writes about how justice is made present in the world. He is Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College where he is Associate Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights. He is author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics and The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis, co-editor of Artifacts of Thinking, and editor of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center. He also edits the Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Newsletter. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, The Paris Review Online, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, The American Interest, and many other publications.