Dermot Moran MRIA, philosopher

Professor Moran approaches his research interests in Early Medieval philosophy and twentieth-century European philosophy, especially phenomenology, largely from a historical perspective, exploring how ideas arise and what shapes they take in different eras and cultures.

2025 marks twenty years since the RIA and the Higher Education Authority established the Gold Medals to acclaim Ireland’s foremost thinkers in the humanities, social sciences, and across the fields of science. The Gold Medals have become the ultimate accolade in scholarly achievement in Ireland. Since 2005, 34 medals have been awarded. In recognition of this important milestone, past RIA Gold Medals recipients have contributed blogs focusing on their research to our Members’ Research Series.

Dermot Moran MRIA is Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy at Boston College and retired professor of philosophy, University College Dublin.

I am fascinated by how ideas arise and what shapes they take in different eras and cultures. ‘Consciousness’, for instance, is a concept not found as such in the work of the ancient Greeks, but that emerged in modern philosophy with Descartes and Locke.

I have two main areas of research interest, both of which I approach largely from a historical perspective: Early Medieval philosophy (especially the great Irish philosopher John Scottus Eriugena, c. 800–c. 877 CE), and twentieth-century European philosophy, especially phenomenology.

I graduated with a BA (Honours) in Philosophy and English from UCD, in 1973, more than 50 years ago, and received my MA and PhD degrees in Philosophy from Yale University. I first taught at Queen’s University Belfast (1979–82), then St Patrick’s College, Maynooth (1982–9), and, finally, University College Dublin (1989–2018). Following retirement from UCD, I was appointed Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy at Boston College, where I continue to work today, dividing my time between Boston and Dublin.

My interest in John Scottus Eriugena was driven by a deep drive to understand the Irish intellectual tradition that has produced great thinkers, such as Berkeley and Burke.

Eriugena was a very important mediator between Greek and Latin traditions and represents a high point of Irish culture at the end of the monastic period. He was a Christian philosopher at the court of the Carolingian king in France, who could translate Greek, but his work also has glosses containing Irish words and phrases. He was a truly international figure, and his conception of a divinity that so transcends the world that it can even be described as ‘nothingness’ has attracted the attention of Asian scholars, who compare it to Buddhism.

My other main area of research is primarily in phenomenology: the description of first-person experience, especially relating to the nature and structures of consciousness, embodiment, empathy and inter-subjective relations that constitute culture, tradition and history in our human ‘life-world’.

Phenomenology always seeks to preserve the first-personal, subjective point of view, in order to combat a reductive or exclusionary objectivism in the sciences. All knowledge is a human achievement and so the human subjective contribution is crucial to understanding the overall nature of knowledge.

For example, I was invited to comment on Pope Francis’s letter on artificial intelligence (AI) issued for the January 2024 World Day of Peace.

This careful and insightful document raises many profound questions for scientists, philosophers and theologians, concerning the challenge of AI in relation to the ‘meaning of human life, the construction of knowledge, and the capacity of the mind to attain truth’. I find it remarkable, as a philosopher and a phenomenologist, how the algorithms and procedures of AI (especially large language models) actually reproduce the dense assumptions, presumptions and practices of our pregiven ‘life-world’.

Although AI systems may be infused with the best ‘moral’ outlooks and ring-fenced with explicit laws and procedures to eliminate bias, it is clear to me that there is an even larger implicit belief and value system built into the operating systems of the platforms themselves that cannot be eliminated. In this sense, AI mirrors the context of our own human thought. The current AI large language models are reproducing our human biases and beliefs. This is inevitable, as the real paradigm we have for artificial intelligence is existing human intelligence (and, increasingly, animal intelligence systems).

So, we cannot eliminate the specifically human dimension, and indeed that is what my research in phenomenology is all about.

I was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2003 and I had the great honour to receive the RIA Gold Medal in the Humanities in 2012. This award really helped to give my research work a boost in the international arena. In 2013 I was elected president of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie, or ‘FISP’), which organises the World Congresses of Philosophy, and of which the RIA is a long-standing member.

As president of FISP, I was in charge of the twenty-fourth World Congress of Philosophy held in Beijing in 2018. This was an enormous task, and, with more than 6,000 registered delegates, resulted in perhaps the largest philosophy conference the world has ever seen. This congress stimulated new dialogue between philosophers East and West (as well as from the global South), and I have been pursuing international cooperation and intercultural philosophy initiatives since then.

Indeed, I have just completed a term as invited professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where most of France’s intellectuals (including Sartre, Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida) were educated, and currently, I am visiting professor at Peking University.

Increasingly, I find myself in dialogue with those researching in the cognitive sciences (about the nature of embedded and enactive cognition) and in psychopathology, about the phenomenology of illness and mental states in general. In all my research, I emphasise that I can bring an independent Irish perspective to bear, and this, and my membership of the Royal Irish Academy, is very much appreciated on my international travels.