Panentheism in Indian and Western Thought

Benedikt Paul Goecke, Dr. phil., Dr. theol., is Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Philosophy of Science at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. He is also a Research Fellow at the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, University of Oxford, and a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Goecke is the author of A Theory of the Absolute (2014), Alles in Gott? (2012), and The Panentheism of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (2018) and the editor of After Physicalism (2012) and The Infinity of God (2018), among other volumes. He has published articles in such journals as The International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Religious Studies, Zygon, Sophia, Faith and Philosophy, TheoLogica, The European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, and Theologie und Philosophie.

Swami Medhananda is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Vedanta Society of Southern California in Hollywood. He also serves as Hindu Chaplain at both UCLA and the University of Southern California. His current research focuses on Vedantic philosophical traditions, global philosophy of religion, cosmopolitan approaches to consciousness, Indian scriptural hermeneutics, and the philosophies of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, and Sri Aurobindo. He is the author of three books: Swami Vivekananda's Vedantic Cosmopolitanism (2022), Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality: Sri Ramakrishna and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion (2018), and The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency: Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno (2013). He is also the editor of The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedanta (2020) and two special issues of the International Journal of Hindu Studies, one on "Vedantic Theodicies" and one on "Swami Vivekananda as a Cosmopolitan Thinker." He has published over 30 articles in academic journals. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley, where he specialized in German aesthetics, and was also a Fulbright Scholar at the Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin and a Visiting Student at Oxford University.