Post:	Professor of Philosophy
Location:	Arts A A034
Email:	M.R.Morris@sussex.ac.uk
Telephone numbers
Internal:	8247
UK:	(01273) 678247
International:	+44 1273 678247

Biography

I was at Oxford as an undergraduate and a postgraduate (with a brief spell as a school-teacher between the two). I came to Sussex in 1985.

Research

My principal current research interests are in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, aesthetics, Wittgenstein (especially the Tractatus), and Plato.

I have recently published An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language, and am currently working on a monograph on the philosophy of language whose aim is to question some of the most fundamental commonly held assumptions in the field.

My Routledge GuideBook to Wittgenstein and the Tractatus was published in October 2008.

My interest in metaphysics is linked both to my work on Wittgenstein's Tractatus and to my current project in the philosophy of language: I aim to maintain a robust realism, according to which the nature of the world as it is in itself is altogether independent of any thought about it or representation of it, and still allow it to be possible to describe the world as it is in itself.  (In effect, this means saying that we can describe the world even though the world does not have the same form as language.)  This is connected with issues about the relation between the conceptual and what is presented to us in experience.

In the philosophy of art, I am interested in two kinds of question, which I think are ultimately related, and which are both connected with my concerns in the philosophy of language.  One is in the ontology of works of art: I am concerned to maintain an anti-reductionist position which respects the fact (as it seems to me) that works of art are essentially meaningful.  The other concerns the relation between the medium (as it is usually called) of a work of art and its meaning or significance.  In general, I am tempted by the view that the value of art is that it enables us to understand the world properly, and to pay proper respect to it.  I have presented a number of papers to the British Society of Aesthetics annual conference in recent years.

As far as Plato is concerned, I have as a long-term goal the development of a broadly unitarian conception of Plato's dialogues (as opposed to the more simply developmental conception to be found, for example, in Terence Irwin's Plato's Ethics).  I have recently published a paper on akrasia (lack of self-control) in the Protagoras and the Republic, in which I argue that there is no great difference in Plato's view between the two dialogues (even if the arguments presented rely on rather different assumptions).

I have supervised doctoral dissertations on Wittgenstein's Tractatus, the content of states of mind, the nature of experience, transcendental arguments, rationality, and other topics in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, as well as on Plato and Aristotle.

Teaching

In 2009-10 I am teaching Introduction to Philosophy, Figures in Analytic Philosophy (Wittgenstein), Figures in Classical Philosophy (Aristotle), Aesthetics, Metaphysics and Philosophy of Language at BA level, and Philosophical Topics and Analytic Aesthetics for the MA.

Office Hours (Spring and Summer): Thursdays 14.00-15.00; Fridays 12.00-13.00

Publications

Books

Routledge GuideBook to Wittgenstein and the Tractatus (Routledge, 2008)

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

The Good and the True (Oxford University Press, 1992)

 

 

Selected Articles and Chapters

'The Question of Idealism in McDowell', Philosophical Topics (forthcoming 2009)

'How Can There be Works of Art?', Guest paper in Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, December 2008

'Mysticism and Nonsense in the Tractatus', with Julian Dodd, European Journal of Philosophy (2008)

'Doing Justice to Musical Works', in K. Stock, ed., Experience, Meaning, and Work: Philosophers on Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 52-78

'Akrasia in the Protagoras and the Republic', Phronesis 51 (2006), 195-229

'Realism beyond Correspondence', in H. Beebee and J. Dodd, eds., Truthmakers: the Contemporary Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 49-65

'Metaphor and Philosophy: an Encounter with Derrida', Philosophy 75 (2000), 225-44

'Mind, World, and Value', in A. O'Hear, ed., Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 303-20

'The Place of Language', Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 67 (1993), 153-72

'Why There are No Mental Representations', Minds and Machines 1 (1991)

'The Varieties of Sense', Philosophical Quarterly 38 (1988), 385-400

'Causes of Behaviour', Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1985), 123-44

'Socrates' Last Argument', Phronesis 30 (1985), 223-48