Dermot Moran
MA, MPhil, PhD (Yale), MRIA, DLitt (NUI)
Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy,
Boston College and
Professor of Philosophy, UCD
Boston College and
Professor of Philosophy, UCD
Publications
Dermot Moran is an internationally recognized expert in phenomenology (esp. Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) and medieval Christian philosophy (especially Neoplatonism, Johannes Scottus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa), with 5 published monographs, 1 co-authored book, 10 edited books (some multi-volume), 34 peer-reviewed journal articles (in top-ranking, international, peer-reviewed journals e.g. Synthese, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Continental Philosophy Review), 100 chapters in refereed collections (major publishers: Oxford UP, Cambridge, Routledge, Stanford), and over 280 invited scholarly and conference presentations, including more than 50 plenary and keynote addresses.
Dermot Moran’s first monograph, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge UP., repr. 2004), was extensively, favourably reviewed (18 reviews; 116 citations), and is internationally a standard reference work. His 600-page monograph, Introduction to Phenomenology (Routledge 2000; 2nd ed in press) won the Ballard Prize for Phenomenology, USA (2001), has been translated into Chinese (2 versions: Simplified and Classic) and Spanish, with over 20 favourable reviews and 1426 citations. His 2005 monograph, Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (Polity), has 9 positive reviews (“outstanding” Times Higher Education Supplement) and 110 citations. Moran’s fourth monograph Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Cambridge U.P. 2012) already has 4 reviews and 10 citations. Dermot Moran’s The Husserl Dictionary (Bloomsbury 2012), co-authored with Joseph Cohen has 19 citations.
Dermot Moran’s edition of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (Routledge, reprinted 2012) has 2487 citations.
Dermot Moran’s The Phenomenology Reader, co-edited with Tim Mooney (Routledge, 2002) has 169 citations.
Although the h-index is not usually used in European philosophy, Prof. Moran’s h-index is currently a very respectable 12 [i-10-index = 15] with 4676 citations [2267 since 2010] (Google Scholar, accessed 17 April 2015).
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The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl had a permanent and profound impact on the philosophical formation of Paul Ricoeur. One could truly say, paraphrasing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s brilliant 1959 essay “The Philosopher and his Shadow,” that Husserl is the philosopher in whose shadow Ricoeur, like Merleau-Ponty, also stands, the thinker to whom he constantly returns. Husserl is Ricoeur’s philosopher of reflection, par excellence. Indeed, Ricoeur always invokes Husserl when he is discussing a paradigmatic instance of contemporary philosophy of “reflection” and also of descriptive, “eidetic” phenomenology. Indeed, I shall argue in this chapter that Husserl’s influence on Ricoeur was decisive and provided a methodology which is permanently in play, even when it has to be concretized and mediated by hermeneutics, as Ricoeur proposes after 1960.
In this paper I explore Husserl’s and Foucault’s approaches to the historical a priori and defend Husserl’s richer notion. Foucault borrows the expression ‘historical a priori’ from Husserl and there are continuities, but also significant and ultimately irreconcilable differences, between their conceptions. Both are looking for ‘conditions of possibility,’ forms of ‘institution’ or instauration, and patterns of transformation (breakthroughs, disruptions), for scientific knowledge. Husserl identifies the ‘a priori of history’ with the ‘historical a priori’ and believes that the ‘invariant essential structures of the historical world’ (Crisis of European Sciences) can be identified. Foucault, on the other hand, is less interested in the Kantian inquiry into the limits or legitimization of knowledge than in the relation between knowledge and power. Foucault rejects the idea of universal and necessary a priori structures and denies that the structure of the conceptual framework (‘episteme’) governing an era can be fully determined. Both Foucault and Husserl contrast ‘inner’ history with external history, but, I argue, Foucault misconstrues Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as a form of ‘absolute subjectivity’ against which his ‘archaeological’ method reacts. In fact, Foucault’s own conception of the historical a priori is ambiguous and fails to have explanatory value precisely because it misunderstands the need for the a priori to be both universal and necessary, and offers no account of the ‘a priori of historicity’ which, for Husserl, is essential to human cultural life.
This introduction presents a state of the art of philosophical research on cognitive phenomenology and its relation to the nature of conscious thinking more generally. We firstly introduce the question of cognitive phenomenology, the motivation for the debate, and situate the discussion within the fields of philosophy (analytic and phenomenological traditions), cognitive psychology and consciousness studies. Secondly, we review the main research on the question, which we argue has so far situated the cognitive phenomenology debate around the following topics and arguments: phenomenal contrast, epistemic arguments and challenges, introspection, ontology and temporal character, intentionality, inner speech, agency, holistic perspective, categorical perception, value, and phenomenological description. Thirdly, we suggest future developments by pointing to four questions that can be explored in relation to the cognitive phenomenology discussion: the self and self-awareness, attention, emotions and general theories of consciousness. We finalise by briefly presenting the six articles of this Special Issue, which engage with some of the topics mentioned and contribute to enlarge the discussion by connecting it to different areas of philosophical investigation.
The early medieval Irish Christian philosopher John Scottus Eriugena is important both for translating into Latin the works of Greek mystical writers such as Dionysius the Areopagite and for his major treatise Periphyseon (On the Division of Nature, c. 867CE) in which he produced a cosmology which included both God and nature. Eriugena thinks of the divine nature as a ” nothingness ” that transcends all being and non-being. Creation is to be understood as the self-manifestation of this transcendent nothingness in the from of being. Eriugena thinks of the human mind too as a form of nothingness which escapes all limitation and definition. Eriugena’s work was hugely influential on later medieval mystics including Meister Eckhart. His work has been compared with Buddhism. I will explore in this paper whether this comparison is justified.
This is a draft document. Please do not quote without permission. See the published version in Moran, Dermot. (D. 莫兰), 一个论及‘无’的西方思想家：约翰.司各脱.爱留根那 , “A Western Thinker of Nothingness: John Scottus Eriugena,” translated into Chinese by 刘素民, Prof. Liu Sumin, 世界哲学, World Philosophy Vol. 6 (2016), pp. 52–57.
Human Studies. Special Issue on Edith Stein. 2015. DOI 10.1007/s10746-015-9363-3
in Ľubica Učník, Ivan Chvatík, and Anita Williams, eds, The Phenomenological Critique of Mathematisation and the Question of Responsibility – Formalisation and the Life-World. Contributions to Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), pp. 107–132
Thane Martin Naberhaus reviews Dermot Moran’s Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction for the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Please see the attached link.
David J. Bachyrycz reviews Dermot Moran’s Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction for Husserl Studies.
Abstract
The person is a concept that emerged in Western philosophy after the ancient Greeks. It has a multiple origination in Alexandrine grammar (first, second, third person), Roman Law (free person versus slave) and Latin Christian Trinitarian theology, epitomized by Boethius’ definition – a person is an individual substance of a rational nature. In this paper I trace some aspects of the history of the concept of person and evaluate contemporary analytic approaches in the light of the Husserlian phenomenological account of the person.
Keywords
Phenomenology, person, naturalism, Husserl, first-person, embodiment, Lynne Rudder Baker
Book Chapter: 'Christian Neoplatonism and The Phenomenological Tradition: The Hidden Influence of John Scottus Eriugena'_2014
Book ChapterDonald Landes reviews Dermot Moran’s Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction for the Canadian Journal of Philosophical Review.
Intentionality: Some Lessons from the History of the Problem from Brentano to the Present_2013
Article In Refereed JournalsThe 17 original essays of this volume explore the relevance of the phenomenological approach to contemporary debates concerning the role of embodiment in our cognitive, emotional and practical life. The papers demonstrate the theoretical vitality and critical potential of the phenomenological tradition both through critically engagement with other disciplines (medical anthropology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, the cognitive sciences) and through the articulation of novel interpretations of classical works in the tradition, in particular the works of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre. The concrete phenomena analyzed in this book include: chronic pain, anorexia, melancholia and depression.
Sebastian Luft reviews Dermot Moran’s The Husserl Dictionary for the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.
“Even the Papuan is a Man and not a Beast”: Husserl on Universalism and the Relativity of Cultures_2011
Article In Refereed JournalsThe Phenomenology of Personhood: Charles Taylor And Edmund Husserl_2009
Article In Refereed JournalsFink’s Speculative Phenomenology: Between Constitution and Transcendence_2007
Article In Refereed JournalsChristian Lotz reviews Dermot Moran’s Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology for Teaching Philosophy.
Please see attached link.
Javier Carreño reviews Dermot Moran’s Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology for the Tijdschrift voor Filosofie.