Prof. Dr. Julian Nida-Rümelin

Prof. Dr Julian Nida-Rümelin is one of Germany’s most renowned philosophers, alongside Jürgen Habermas and Peter Sloterdijk. He taught philosophy and political theory at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich from 2004 to 2020 and has been Rector of the Berlin University of the Humanities since 2022 (where he heads the part-time Master’s programme in Applied Ethics). From 2020 to 2024, he served as Deputy Chair of the German Ethics Council.
He is regarded as an independent and critical thinker who contributes intelligently to current social debates (education, digitalisation, artificial intelligence).

Prof. Nida-Rümelin is Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of Parmenides Academy GmbH, a think tank that trains and advises executives on philosophical and ethical issues.

In recent years, Prof. Nida-Rümelin has been examining the ethical and philosophical aspects of digitalisation, including in his role as lead investigator on an EU research project on the ethics of robotics (as part of the RoboLaw research cluster).
He has also examined the philosophical and ethical aspects of autonomous driving and, more generally, the use of software systems in both professional and private contexts.

For five years (1998 to 2002), Prof. Nida-Rümelin moved into cultural policy, initially as Cultural Affairs Officer for the City of Munich and then as Minister of State for Culture in Schröder’s first cabinet. In this role, he headed a government department with a total of 6,000 staff and a budget of over one billion euros.

He is a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences and has engaged extensively with issues relating to education. In 2013, he sparked a debate on the increasing academisation of society with an interview in the *FAZ*.
In October 2016, the Bavarian State Government awarded him the ‘Medal for Special Services to Bavaria in a United Europe’. In 2019, he was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize in Austria for the best political book of the year for his work *Digital Humanism*. In 2019, he was awarded the Bavarian Order of Merit; in 2023, the Reinhard Hesse Foundation’s Prize for Academic Freedom; and in 2024, the Premio Giacomo Leopardi from the Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani in Recanati.

Prof. Nida-Rümelin studied philosophy, physics, mathematics and political science in Munich and Tübingen. Following a visiting professorship in the USA, he was initially a professor at the Centre for Ethics in the Sciences at the University of Tübingen and then held a chair in philosophy at the University of Göttingen for ten years.
He is a political adviser, an intellectual, a bridge-builder between philosophy and politics, and a philosopher who occasionally engages in political life.
He delivers lectures in German, English and Italian.