Christian Illies

Biography

Christian Illies studied biology (Diplombiologe) and art history before coming up to the University of Oxford. At Magdalen College he completed his DPhil on Kantian ethics and later habilitated in philosophy at RWTH Aachen. Following academic appointments in Essen, Eindhoven, and Delft—where he served on the founding board of the 3TU Centre for Ethics and Technology—he took up the chair of Practical Philosophy and Philosophical Anthropology at the University of Bamberg in 2008. His work brings together moral philosophy, human nature and evolution, political anthropology, and the philosophical significance of architecture. He is founding co-director of the Institut Mensch & Ästhetik, an interdisciplinary initiative exploring the role of beauty, atmosphere, and human experience in architecture and culture. His books include The Grounds of Ethical Judgement (Oxford University Press), Philosophische Anthropologie im biologischen Zeitalter (Suhrkamp), and Philosophy of Architecture (with Nicholas Ray), reflecting his interest in bridging—within the framework of a renewed objective idealism—the gap between modern science and the human self-understanding as a distinctive, morally self-reflective being in nature.