In memoriam Professor Maria Rosa Antognazza

Professor Maria Rosa Antognazza served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board at the Max-Weber-Kolleg during the years 2014-2020. She was particularly known for her interests and internationally recognized scholarship at the intersection between religion, philosophy and enlightenment, the relationship between science and religion, metaphysical issues in philosophical theology and the philosophical and theological foundations of religious tolerance.

As Professor at King’s College London, where she served as Head of the Philosophy Department from 2011/12 to 2014/15 and as President of the British Society for the History of Philosophy of Religion (2019-2022) and was the current chair of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, she was elected a member of the Academia Europaea in 2022. She was educated at the Catholic University of Milan and after a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, she lectured in philosophy at the University of Aberdeen until she joined King’s College in 2003. She has held research fellowships and visiting professorships in Italy, Germany, Israel, Great Britain, Switzerland, and the USA, including, a two-year research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, the Leibniz-Professorship (Leipzig, 2016), and the 2019-2020 Mind Senior Research Fellowship for work on her book Thinking with Assent: Renewing a Traditional Account of Knowledge and Belief (Oxford University Press). In 2020, she won the Pfizer Award.

Her publications include Leibniz on the Trinity and the Incarnation: Reason and Revelation in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press 2007); Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge University Press 2009; winner of the 2010 Pfizer Award); and Leibniz: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2016). She was the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Leibniz (Oxford University Press 2018) and of early modern texts including Hugo Grotius, The Truth of the Christian Religion [Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics] (Liberty Fund 2012) and (with Howard Hotson) Alsted and Leibniz on God, the Magistrate and the Millennium (Harrassowitz Verlag 1999). She co-edited the series BSHP New Texts in the History of Philosophy (Oxford University Press).

After a long struggle with cancer, she passed away on 28. March 2023. We will remember her with gratitude for her contributions to the Max-Weber-Kolleg and the University of Erfurt.