Having been a student at Balliol College, Oxford from 1948 to 1951, Alan Montefiore spent the next ten years as a Lecturer in Philosophy at the then new University College of North Staffordshire (later to become the University of Keele). In 1961 he returned to Balliol as a Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, retiring just over 30 years later. Since then, he has, among many other things, served as the first President of the Forum for European Philosophy, now the Forum for Philosophy.

Danielle Sands is Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London and Fellow at the Forum for Philosophy, LSE. Her monograph, Animal Writing: Storytelling, Selfhood and the Limits of Empathy was published in 2019.