Prof.dr. Rik Peels holds a University Research Chair in Analytic and Interdisciplinary Philosophy of Religion in the Faculty of the Social Sciences and Humanities at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is also a research associate at the African Center for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. He leads the Extreme Beliefs research group and is co-PI of the NWO-funded Adapt! project on crisis adaptation. He specializes in the ethics and epistemology of extreme belief and behavior as we find it in extremism, fanaticism, fundamentalism, radical conspiracy theorizing, and terrorism. He also works on replication in the humanities. Among his recent books are A Philosophy of the Humanities (with Stephen Grimm and René van Woudenberg, OUP), Monotheism and Fundamentalism (CUP 2024), Life without God (CUP 2023) and Ignorance (OUP 2023). He is the main editor of the Extreme Belief and Behavior Series (OUP 2025-2027).