Congratulations to Mark Wrathall, who has been awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust. The Fellowships are for well-established, distinguished researchers in the humanities and social sciences to complete a piece of original research. They are particularly aimed at those who are or have been prevented by routine duties from completing a programme of original research.
The Fellowship will enable Mark, Professor of Philosophy, to pursue research for two years on ‘The metaphysics of existential phenomenology’. The most important works in 20th century existential phenomenology, for instance, Heidegger’s Being and Time or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, are at their core studies of ontology. But much of the recent reception of these works neglects the metaphysical foundations of existential philosophy to focus on its relevance to moral philosophy – for instance, by concentrating on Heidegger’s accounts of authenticity and guilt, or Sartre’s analyses of bad faith, shame, alienation, etc. Professor Wrathall hopes to articulate and critically examine the key metaphysical presuppositions that underlie existential approaches to moral philosophy. He is very grateful to the Trust for this generous support of his work.
Mark joined Corpus in July 2017. Before that he was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He works in the existential and phenomenological tradition of European Philosophy. He is particularly interested in the phenomenology of action and agency, and the phenomenology of religious life. In recent years, he has published a number of articles on authenticity.