Faculty

Michael Morris

Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies

CONTACT

Office: FAO 235
Phone: (813) 974-5620
Email

BIO

Ph.D. Philosophy University of Notre Dame, 2008.  Joined the philosophy department at USF in 2010 after a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena, Germany.  His research interests include the political context and dimensions of the early reception of Kant’s philosophy, with an emphasis on the works of K.L. Reinhold, J.G. Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel, August Rehberg, Friedrich Gentz, Anselm Feuerbach, J.B. Erhard, Friedrich Nicolai, and C.G. Schütz.  His articles in this area include “The Revolution Devours Its Children: In Memory of Christian Gottfried Schütz,” and “The French Revolution and the New School of Europe: Towards a Political Interpretation of German Idealism.”  The later article is forthcoming in the European Journal of Philosophy.  He is currently working on a manuscript that explores the use and development of organic metaphors in German debates about the French Revolution.  This book considers the role of organic metaphors in the theory-praxis debates of 1790s, in the German reception of Edmund Burke’s political philosophy, in debates about natural rights, in the split between the Left-Kantians (Reinhold, Fichte, Feuerbach, Erhard) and the Right-Kantians (Gentz, Rehberg), and in Hegel’s 1802 Natural Right essay, a work in which all these themes find their culmination.  Additionally, he is interested in questions of social ontology, accounts of false consciousness, and theories of collective agency, particularly as these issues are developed in the works of Hegel and Marx.