Godehard Brüntrup

Prof. Dr. Godehard Brüntrup, SJ is a German professor of philosophy and member of the Jesuit Order. He studied philosophy in Munich (together with Philip Clayton) and later got his PhD (on mental causation) in Berlin in 1993. He also holds a degree in Catholic theology. He currently teaches metaphysics and philosophy of mind at the Munich School of Philosophy and St. Louis University. He is one of architects of the revival of panpsychism in analytic philosophy for which he began arguing in his introduction to the mind-body problem in Germany in 1993. This book had a significant impact on German theology where younger scholars began to explore the connections between theology, panpsychism, and panentheism. In 2002, during an extended stay as a visiting professor at Fordham University in New York, he began studying Whitehead and process philosophy and was intrigued by the similarities to his own position. He was then one of the co-founders of the German Whitehead Society and organized a number of conferences on Whitehead and process philosophy in Germany. He also was one of the founders of the German “Whitehead Studien” (Alber Publishers). Funded by the John Templeton Foundation, he was one of the lead researchers in two large international projects in philosophical theology from 2012 to 2019. In this context he argued for a concept of panentheism that was inspired by process theology. For several years now he has been working in interdisciplinary projects with empirical psychologists developing a Whitehead-inspired view of the person as a “process of successive mental integration”. In 2023 co-hosted the 13th International Whitehead Conference on “Whitehead and the History of Philosophy.”