Dermot Moran

Since 1989, I have held the Professorship of Philosophy, holding the National University of Ireland statutory Chair of Philosophy (Metaphysics & Logic) at University College Dublin. Since 1993 I have been an elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy. I have held visiting positions at Yale University (1987), Connecticut College (1992-3), Rice University (Fall 2003, Spring 2006), Northwestern University (2007), Trinity College Dublin (ongoing), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Summer 2010) and Murdoch University, Perth.

At University College Dublin I have served as Head of the Department of Philosophy for three periods: 1989-92; 1993-6; and 1999-2001.

I am currently an elected member of the UCD Governing Authority (2009-2014), responsbile for the overall governance of the university, and I also serve on several University committees including the Research Ethics Committee (REC, see http://www.ucd.ie/researchethics/rec.html), which oversees all research in the university. I am chairperson of the Working Group on Regenerative Medicine examining the ethical questions around the use of human embryonic stem cells in research. We have just produced a new report (June 2011) on human embryonic stem cells (hESC). I am currently a member of the UCD Selection Committee charged with appointing the next President of University College Dublin.

I am currently President/Chairperson of the Programme Committee of FISP (International Federation of Philosophy Societies) responsbile for the academic programme for the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy scheduled to be held in Athens from 4-10 August 2013. I am also the current President of the Irish Phenomenological Circle.

Born in Dublin in the suburb of Stillorgan, I was educated at Oatlands College Primary and Secondary Schools, Mount Merrion, Co Dublin, run by the Christian Brothers. I completed the Leaving Certificate examination and entered University College Dublin (in 1970) on a UCD Entrance Scholarship to study Arts. I graduated in September 1973 with a BA Double First Class Honours Degree in English and Philosophy. As a recipient of the Wilmarth Lewis-Farmington Scholarship to Yale University, I went to Yale for graduate study in September 1973. I graduated from Yale University with MA (1974), MPhil (1976) and PhD (1986) degrees in Philosophy. My dissertation supervisor was Professor Karsten Harries and my thesis was entitled ‘Nature and Mind in the Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena’ (subsequently published as a monograph by Cambridge University Press.

While at Yale (from 1974-1978) I was a Teaching Assistant in Philosophy and also taught a College Seminar at Ezra Stiles College. I was Teaching Assistant for Professor George Schrader (‘Persons, Roles and Social Structures’, 1974 and ‘Political Philosophy’, 1977); Karsten Harries (‘Philosophy of Existence’, 1975); Edward Casey (‘Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis’, 1976); Harry Frankfurt (‘Introduction to Modern Philosophy’, 1976) and Robert Brumbaugh (‘Ethics of Classical Greece’, ‘Philosophy of Space and Time’, 1978). I also taught at College Seminar on James Joyce in 1976 at Yale.

In 1979 I returned to Ireland to lecture at Queen’s University Belfast (1979-82) in the Department of Scholastic Philosophy, under the late Rev. Professor James McEvoy, primarily teaching medieval philosophy and contemporary European philosophy. In 1982 I moved to a permanent lectureship in the Department of Philosophy at St Patrick's College, Maynooth, then a Recognised College of the National University of Ireland (1982-89), and now a full constituent university of the National University of Ireland and known as NUIM. In 1989 I was appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy in University College Dublin, appointed by the Senate of the National University of Ireland.

I have been a member of the Irish Philosophical Society since 1979, and I have served as its Treasurer (1983-6), Secretary (1986-9, 1999 - 2001) and President. I have also served as Chairperson of the Royal Irish Academy National Committee for Philosophy (1992-95) President of the Mind Association (1996-97), Vice-President (1997-98). Member of Aristotelian Society (UK). Member of the British Society for Phenomenology. Member of the Hegel Society of Great Britain. Member of the Hegel Society of the US. Founder Member of the Kant Society, UK. Member of the Association of Philosophy Journal Editors. Member of the American Philosophical Association. Member of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugena Studies (SPES). Patron and Founding Member of the Eckhart Society (UK). Fellow of Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology (CARP). Elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy, March 2003. Elected Member of Steering Committee Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie (FISP) August 2003; re-elected August 2008.

I have published 4 monographs, a co-edited dictionary (The Husserl Dictionary-- with Joseph Cohen),7 edited books (some multi-volume); over 40 articles, over 60 book chapters in scholarly collections, and delivered over 250 scholarly presentations (including invited papers, conferences, workshops and masterclasses). My first monograph, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989; reprinted 2004), was extensively and favourably reviewed and is a standard reference work. There I argue that concerns with subjectivity and the mind-dependence of reality are not, contrary to the received view, a product of modernity (associated with Descartes’ turn to the ego) but are rooted in medieval Platonism. This interest in subjectivity led me in a new direction—to phenomenology. My second (600 page) monograph, Introduction to Phenomenology (2000), a critical study of major themes and figures in the phenomenological movement, won the Ballard Prize for Phenomenology (2001), has been translated into Chinese (twice) and Spanish (with a Turkish translation agreed), and is referenced by leading studies in the field and features on course syllabi internationally, i.e. in USA and Canada, UK, Europe, Australia, China, etc. It has received over 20 favourable reviews in, e.g. Times Literary Supplement (8th June 2001) (David Bell); Inquiry Vol. 44 No. 1 (March 2001) (Paul S. Macdonald); Synthese 131 (2002), (Steven Crowell); Review of Metaphysics Vol. LV no. 1, issue no. 217 (Sept. 2001) (Andrew Lamb); Journal of British Society of Phenomenology Vol. 32 No. 1 (Jan. 2001), (William S. Hamrick); Journal Phänomenologie 13 (2000) (Sebastian Luft); Journal of Consciousness Studies Vol. 7 No. 10 (2000), (John Dance); Tijdschrift voor Filosofie No 4 (2000), (Philipp Rosemann); Manuscrito Vol. XXIII 2, (2000) (Allen Casebier); Mind Issue 438 (April 2001) (Simon Glendinning); Philosophical Quarterly, (Oct. 2002) (Paul Gorner); International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 11 No. 1 (March 2003), (Tom Rockmore); Thesis Eleven Vol. 69 No. 1 (May 2002) (Andrew Dawson); and Psychologist-Psychoanalyst, Vol. 24, No. 4, Fall 2004 (Robert Stolorow). The reviews commend my explication of the phenomenological movement as clear, scientifically exact, and reliable, and acknowledge my critical evaluation as original, posing challenges to orthodox accounts (including Gadamer and Arendt as part of the phenomenological tradition, for instance).

My third monograph, Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (Polity, 2005), has also been widely and favourably reviewed by experts in the field; see, for example, Times Higher Education Supplement (7thMay 2006) (Stephen Mulhall); Husserl Studies Vol. 24 No. 1 (April, 2008) (Robert Dostal); Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, Vol. 68 no. 4 (2006) (Javier Carreño); Teaching Philosophy, vol. 29 no. 4 (December 2006) (Christian Lotz); American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly vol. 81 no. 4 (Fall, 2007) (Nicolas de Warren); British Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 15 no. 4 (Nov 2007) (Guillaume Fréchette); International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Volume 16 No 1 (Feb. 2008), (John Brough) and Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society (2008) (Julia Jansen). There I argue for the continuity (masked by the disrupted history of his publications) in Husserl’s work against those who see Husserl as initially a realist phenomenologist whose work took a transcendental idealist turn after 1907. I explicate Husserl’s account of the essential structures of consciousness and selfhood and defend his transcendental critique of naturalism.

In 2008, I edited the 1000-page The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy (2008), examining the contacts and continuities between the major intellectual traditions of that century. This book has been praised by Hilary Putnam, Quassim Cassam (‘hard to imagine a more useful, comprehensive or distinguished collection of essays’), and Ernest Sosa ( ‘This outstanding volume is meta-philosophy of a high order: a welcome, expert review of the course of our discipline in the century just ended’).
My fourth monograph on Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences is published by Cambridge U.P. and will be available from September 2012.

I have co-edited a number of collections on phenomenology, including Epistemology (2008), Phenomenology Reader (Routledge 2002), and the 5-volume Phenomenology. Critical Concepts (Routledge, 2004) and edited a revised, corrected translation of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (Routledge, 2001).

I am also most interested in Neoplatonism and especially the Irish Christian Neoplatonist Johannes Scottus Eriugena. I have written on Eriugena, Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa as well as on medieval philosophers such as Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas.

Currently I am researching the phenomenology of embodiment and the phenomenology of intersubjective social life. I have been working on a set of interconnected issues relating to embodiment that connect philosophy, psychology, cognitive science and the arts. I am particularly interested in sensory perception and the interconnection and cooperation between the senses (especially sight and touch) as well as in problematic cases such as synaesthesia. I have also been researching Husserl's and Merleau-Ponty's accounts of embodiment and the manner in which the lived body is inserted into the environment and relates to others (intersubjectivity, empathy, intercorporeity). I have given a number of recent seminars on perception, embodied experience, and the perception of other living persons in empathy (also known--in the analytic tradition-- as "mind reading").

Currently, I am developing a new research project on the nature of the person, including both ontological and ethical aspects of personhood. Persons are recognized in international law and must be accorded dignity and respect. Persons are inviolable. Yet what it is to be a person is not understood and some deny the very existence of persons. I use the phenomenological approach to investigate persons from the concrete perspective.

Husserl claims that the personalistic attitude is the most basic attitude -- it is as it were the real "natural attitude" for humans. What does this mean? How are we to understand persons? What are the limits of personhood? In this regard I am exploring concepts of the person in Kant, Husserl, Scheler, Edith Stein and the phenomenological tradition generally.

I am involved in a research project on the life-world involving Husserl and Jan Patocka.