Humberto Schubert Coelho, Prof. Dr.

Prof. Humberto Schubert Coelho is Professor for Philosophy of Religion at the Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora in Minas Gerais, Brazil. His research interests include a variety of metaphysical questions, particularly in the field of philosophy of religion and cultural philosophy. From October 2025 to April 2026, he is a visiting researcher at the PTH-Brixen, where he will examine how the philosophy of medicine can respond to the challenges posed by new insights into the connection between spirituality and health. 

Prof. Coelho studied philosophy and religious studies at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, the University of Passau and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany. After completing his doctorate, he received a postdoctoral fellowship in Protestant theology (2012–2013) to research the methodological differences between theology, religious studies and philosophy of religion. From 2019 to 2020, he was a visiting researcher at the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at the University of Oxford, where he studied aesthetic realism and the history of religious freedom. In 2022, Prof. Coelho was appointed as the 23rd member of the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy; he is an active member of several research institutes and academic groups in Brazil and Portugal.

In recent decades, research on spirituality and health has grown rapidly. More than 10,000 scientific papers on this topic have now been published, many of them in leading journals in medicine, psychology and public health sciences. This growing field of research has revealed several conceptual and cross-disciplinary problems between the natural sciences and the humanities. Spiritual experiences and practices, and terms such as “spirituality” and “transcendence”, are often narrowly defined in relation to traditional religions, which can lead to misunderstandings and hinder academic discourse. This situation is further complicated by cultural biases and the perceived conflict between science and religion, which challenges naturalistic approaches to spirituality and spiritual experiences. Philosophical clarity and conceptual distinctions can play a key role in refining religious, philosophical, and scientific approaches to these topics. 

In Brixen, Prof. Coelho, together with Cusanus Professor Ludger Jansen, aims to demonstrate that evidence-based discourse on human spirituality requires philosophical reflection, but can enrich both philosophical and theological perspectives on the spiritual nature of human beings.

The sponsor
Prof. Coelho's research project in Brixen is supported by a grant from the Brazilian foundation Instituto Homero Pinto Vallada.