Assistant Professor
(Starting from Fall 2025)
Ph.D., Cambridge University
Areas of Interest: Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Meta-Ethics, Early Modern Philosophy, Early Analytic Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Well-Being
Personal Homepage: https://www.alexmoran.net/
Email: alex.moran@unifr.ch
Phone: tbd
Office: tbd
About
Alex Moran completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in (2019). He also has a BA in Philosophy from University College London and a B. Phil in Philosophy from Oxford University. Whilst a doctoral student at Cambridge, he also held a Jacobsen Studentship (2016-17), and Aristotelian Bursary (2016-17) and a Mind Fellowship (2017-18). He was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford (2019-21) and an IRC Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin (2022-23), as well as a visiting scholar in Princeton in Spring Term (2024). Before the move to Bilkent, he was an SNSF Research Fellow at the Université de Fribourg, and remains a Research Associate at Stockholm University, in connection with his project “Beyond Reductionism: Contingent Grounding and the Mind-Body Problem“.
Moran works on topics in metaphysics (particularly in the neo-Aristotelian tradition), in the philosophy of mind (particularly perception and the mind-body problem), in meta-ethics (particularly metaphysical questions relating to the nature of the normative and the precise connection between the normative and the descriptive), the history of philosophy (particularly epistemic and metaphysical questions pertaining to early moderns, and select questions about figures in early analytic philosophy, such as the early Oxbridge sense-datum theorists), and the philosophy of religion (primarily Buddhism and Christianity). His articles have appeared in such journals as Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, Analytic Philosophy, Philosophical Perspectives and many more. He’s published co-authored and single-authored articles in edited volumes with publishers like Oxford University Press and Bloomsbury, and is the co-editor of both a special issue of the Journal of Conscious Studies (with Philip Goff), and of a co-edited volume with Oxford University Press entitled Objects and Properties: New Essays (with Carlo Rossi). His essay ‘Memory Disjunctivism: A Causal Theory’, published in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology, (2021), won second-place in the Philosophy of Memory Essay Prize hosted by the Centre for the Philosophy of Memory at the Institute de Philosophie de Grenoble. He is preparing a co-edited volume (with Ralf Bader) on Reductionism in Metaphysics, Meta-Ethics, and the Philosophy of Mind, to be submitted to Oxford University Press. He is currently writing his first academic book, The Doors of Perception: The Disclosive Nature of Sensory Experience, and is negotiating an advanced contract with Oxford University Press; he also has a trade book under contract with Reaktion Press In Praise of Mischief which offers a tongue-in-cheek philosophical analysis of mischief and trouble-making. He’s also published non-academic pieces for general audiences including book reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, interview articles in the Irish Times, and essays in places like Aeon and Psyche. When not writing philosophy, he reads literature voraciously: he has published poetry and is working currently on his first novel. He also enjoys relaxing by playing the guitar or listening to music, which can be anything from Chopin and Beethoven, Muddy Waters and Thelonius Monk, Bob Dylan and The Beatles, and various guiltier musical pleasures, from Justin Bieber to Taylor Swift.
Sample publications
Moran, A. & C. Rossi. (forthcoming). Objects and Properties: New Essays in Metaphysics, Oxford University Press.
Moran, A. (forthcoming). In Praise of Mischief (Reaktion Press).
Moran, A. (forthcoming). Does Negative Epistemic Disjunctivism Solve the Screening Off Problem? Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
Moran, A. (forthcoming). Contingent Grounding Physicalism. Analytic Philosophy.
Moran, A. (2024). Disjunctivism and the Causal Conditions of Hallucination. Erkenntnis, 89, 129–152.
Moran, A. (2023). Grounding Physicalism and the Knowledge Argument. Philosophical Perspectives: A Supplement to Noûs, 37 (1): 269-289.
Moran, A. (2023). Grounding Physicalism and “Moorean” Connections. Inquiry, October, 1–24.
Moran, A. (2022). Living Without Microphysical Supervenience. Philosophical Studies, 179(1): 405-428.
Moran, A. (2022). Memory Disjunctivism: A Causal Theory. Review of Philosophy and Psychology. 13, 1097–1117 (Second-place runner-up in the Philosophy of Memory Essay Prize hosted by the Centre for the Philosophy of Memory at the Institute de Philosophie de Grenoble.)
Moran, A. (2021). Grounding the Qualitative: A New Challenge for Panpsychism. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 28 (9/10): 163-180.
Moran, A. (2019). Naïve Realism, Hallucination, Causation: A New Response to the Screening Off Problem. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 27(2): 368-382.
Moran, A. (2019). Naïve Realism, Seeing Stars, and Perceiving the Past. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 97(2): 368-382.
Moran, A. (2018). The Paradox of Decrease and Dependent Parts. Ratio, 31(3): 273-284.
Moran, A. (2018). Kind-Dependent Grounding. Analytic Philosophy, 59(3): 359-390.