Xudong Zhang is Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies at NYU. He is the founding director of the International Center for Critical Theory (ICCT), which co-organizes the Winter Institute series with University of Tokyo, Australian National University, and University of Bonn, Germany. He has published widely on critical theory and transcultural comparisons of Chinese and European modernities.
Markus Gabriel has held the Chair of Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Bonn since 2009, where he also directs the International Center for Philosophy (IZPH) and the trandisciplinary Center for Science and Thought (CST). He is a regular visiting professor in Paris (Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne) and at the New School for Social Research, where he has directed the Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities since 2020. Other visiting professorships have taken him to UC Berkeley and, in 2019, to New York University. His most recent publications are "Fictions" (Suhrkamp 2020) and "Moral Progress in Dark Times" (Ullstein 2020). In his book "Der Sinn des Denkens" (Ullstein 2018) and other publications, he has developed basic lines of a philosophy of AI, which he is currently continuing to research.