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INTERVIEW WITH DERMOT MORAN
The Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy



9Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Interview with Dermot Moran

Dianoia conducted an interview with Dermot Moran, the Joseph Chair in Catholic 
Philosophy and current Chair of the Department of Philosophy. Joining Boston College in 
2017 after serving as the Gadamer Visiting Professor in 2015, he is currently the President 
of the International Federation of Philosophical Studies/Fédération Internationale des 
Sociétés de Philosophie (FISP) and Founding Editor of ‘The International Journal of 
Philosophical Studies’ (1993). Moran’s research areas include medieval philosophy 
(especially Christian Platonism) and contemporary European philosophy (especially 
phenomenology), and he is the author of nine monographs, fifteen edited books, and 
hundreds of journal articles and book chapters. 

Dianoia: Could you describe what phenomenology is and say a little about its 
founder Edmund Husserl?

Moran: Well first of all, I always emphasize that phenomenology is an approach 
rather than a strict method. Edmund Husserl, who is the founder of phenomenology 
and the Logical Investigations (1900), really wanted a strict method and a method 
that would underline all the other sciences. It would be a scientific method to beat 
all scientific methods, that was his idea. And of course, his famous slogan was “back 
to the things themselves” since he wanted a descriptive science that describes how 
our consciousness encounters the world in the manner that it presents itself. It was 
meant to be a transparent description of our experience in its full richness, but his 
methodology was very much contested even by his own students (e.g. Heidegger, 
Merleau-Ponty, and others), so his bracketing method, his method of pure 
description evolved. So I rather see phenomenology as still having this attention to 
the rich detail of our experience, but there are many different methodologies within 
an overall approach. But the overall approach is anti-speculative, anti-theorizing 
and just staying with the experiences, or phenomena in the broadest sense. So for 
example, how we experience an art object, how we interrelate with others in the life-
world, these are all things that we need to describe in—as Husserl would put it—an 
unprejudiced manner.  

Dianoia: What’s the distinction between Husserl’s pure phenomenology and what 
came with his followers in developing existential phenomenology, and who are some 
of the figureheads of each group?

Moran: Husserl had a huge number of very loyal followers, especially in the early 
phase, and they’re often called the realist phenomenologists since they wanted to 
have phenomenology as a kind of realist description of the world; they really tried 
to overcome pre-judgment and prejudice. But once you have Heidegger coming 
along—the founder of existential phenomenology—he’s the thinker that says there’s 
no such thing as pure description, that all description is interpreted, and thereby 
gives a hermeneutical or interpretive phenomenology. But he also wanted to expand 
Husserl's interest in the body and consciousness, i.e. the body and the subject, to a 



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

much broader interest in concrete human existence. That’s really what inspires Sartre, 
Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir to take up this notion of existence. Dasein literally means 
existence. So Heidegger is saying phenomenology is an analysis of Dasein’s being-in-
the-world, that becomes translated by the French as a description of our concrete 
existence. So I would say that you could find a lot of that in Husserl, especially in 
the later Husserl. And yet, it’s very difficult to tell whether Heidegger’s influencing 
Husserl or if it’s the other way around since both were in daily contact for ten years. 
Heidegger didn’t publish much and Husserl didn’t publish much from 1917 to 1927 
so we only have their notes, and consequently, it’s hard to tell. But both of them 
start moving more and more to the idea of historically-invented being-in-the-world, 
which is also limited by time since it is finite—so we are finite beings located in 
a specific situation. Right now we are in the middle of the 21st century, so that 
alters our engagement in the world. So those factors, that being-in-the-world shapes 
our encounter in the world and means that there’s no pure and direct, unmediated 
experience. Experience is always mediated by our beliefs, customs, habits, practices 
and so on. That’s the big shift I think. 

Dianoia: You mention “philosophical bracketing” or the epoché—how might we 
apply this and other phenomenological tools to everyday or quotidian phenomena?

Moran: Well, I think Husserl himself picked it up from the ancient skeptics, and he 
sees it as an archetypal philosophical practice, and the practice is that of withholding 
assent. That’s how the skeptics saw it. When you have two propositions that both seem 
to be true, let’s say the Democrats are doing a good job in handling the environment, 
and on the other side is, the Republicans are doing a very good job in keeping the 
economy open. These are not exactly contradictory, but they are two opposing views. 
And when you are faced with that, the ancient skeptics thought that in the absence 
of confirming evidence for one or the other we should withhold assent. So Husserl 
thinks that broadly speaking the epoché is a bracketing, or withholding of assent or 
a withdrawal of commitment, and that means we can take a much more detached 
look at our own experience. So that’s the really key point—he thinks that we need 
to take the non-participating observer stance to our own experience, and I think 
we can all benefit from that. Standing back from our immediate engagement with 
things, and then trying to take a stance above our experience and look at it. This 
is the job of the transcendental spectator, and even though other philosophers like 
Heidegger rejected the idea of a transcendental ego, they still are engaged in that 
kind of ‘sideways look on at our own existence.' When Heidegger says that most of 
our existence is caught up in everydayness, how do you know that unless you kind of 
step out of that experience and are looking at it from another perspective? So I think 
yes, the phenomenological epoché is a practice of disengaging from our immediate 
tendencies, beliefs, affirmations, confirmations and of adopting a much more non-
engaged scrutiny of our experience with the hope that it will yield a lot more genuine 



11Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Interview with Dermot Moran

evidence. 

Dianoia: In light of the coronavirus outbreak, how does our perception of the virus 
shape its impact on the world in both a social and political sense, and how might the 
phenomenological reduction (or any other phenomenological concepts) bring clarity 
to public discourse?

Moran: I’ve been thinking about that a lot because I actually have spent time in 
Wuhan—I was a visiting professor there three years ago, and have very good friends 
there who have given me firsthand information about their lives and about the 
changes in their lives. I think initially people in the West thought about this as a local 
problem in China, and there was a lot of misinformation initially; for example, that 
COVID-19 was no worse than the common flu, or that some would build immunity 
to it, but in fact it’s ten times more deadly than the seasonal flu. Furthermore, for the 
flu there’s a vaccine, but for COVID-19 there’s none. And so the authorities were very 
slow in moving forward, it was like a tidal wave starting in China and Korea, and then 
showing up in Italy, Spain, France and then the UK and America. So each country 
had time to see what was happening, and quite honestly, they should have moved 
earlier. But what it does show, and I think this is really from the phenomenological 
point of view, is that first of all we live in one common technological world. I mean 
this was a virus that was spread by air travel, this was spread by people using airplanes, 
and so, this was highly mobile because our societies are highly mobile. Secondly, it’s 
been interesting to see that many of the things that we thought belonged to our 
everyday life we just took so much for granted (so this a good example of the epoché). 
So we just took all of normal life for granted, completely. In other words, we are 
living in the natural attitude and we just assume things like public transport and 
restaurants being open, being able to visit friends, all of those things we just took for 
granted. And our everyday life that we thought was so boring and uninteresting is 
really vital. And we’re all missing it now, and so this is a chance for us to realize that 
this supposedly  inauthentic everyday natural life that we had isn’t just always there, 
but is a fragile human construct that’s threatened by things like this global pandemic. 
So we have to be very careful to guard our social realities, and to make sure that they 
come back. There’s big debates about opening public parks because people that live 
in crowded conditions don’t have public spaces to exercise in. But you also don’t 
want the public parks to be crowded, so there’s a fine balance to be drawn. But the 
reason parks were brought in during the 19th century was to provide people who 
lived in cramped urban conditions with public spaces to get exercise, to get fresh air 
and all of these things. I’ve started teaching Camus’ The Plague, and I had forgotten 
until the virus came along how Camus had extraordinary foresight and described 
exactly the situation that we’re in currently. I’ll just read you a small passage from 
The Plague, “once plague had shut the gates of the town, they had settled down to a 
life of separation, debarred from the living warmth that gives forgetfulness of all. In 



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

different degrees in every part of the town, men and women had been yearning for a 
reunion, not of the same kind for all, but for all alike ruled on it. Most of them longed 
intensely for an absent one, or for the warmth of a body, for love, or merely for the 
life and habit that they had endured. Some, often without knowing it, suffered from 
being deprived of the company of friends and from their inability to get in touch 
with them through the usual channels of friendship (e.g. letters, trains, and boats).” 
That’s kind of a short description of the loss of the everyday social contact that this 
brings, that Camus describes extraordinary well, and that the only response—the 
response of the doctor—is to do your job, to face up to your responsibilities and to 
try and do your part in restoring this human life as best as we can. 

Dianoia: When we eventually do return to normalcy, what lasting effects do you 
think that the coronavirus and social distancing will have on society?

Moran: I’ve been reading Giogio Agamben’s book The State of Exception, and it was 
written after 9/11 in 2005, and it was about the various forms of political and social 
control brought in allegedly as emergency circumstances, which become part of the 
new normal. And I was also reading Slavoj Zizek’s new book Pandemic!, and it says 
a lot of the same things that as philosophers we have to be careful of. It’s certainly 
true that many things are introduced as emergency measures and then they never go 
away again. The classic example is income tax—introduced as an emergency measure 
during the civil war to pay for it, and it’s never gone away because this was a great 
way of extracting money from the people. And one of the things that worries me 
most, and it’s always a two-edged sword, is that modern technological means of social 
control, which are largely done by using your phone’s geolocation, are being used 
very widely in China to monitor people’s movements. And yet, the good part of 
this is that it stops people who are in contact with the virus from spreading it any 
further. Google and Amazon are posing a similar thing here, so that you could get a 
text in the morning saying that you had been in contact with someone who had the 
virus and then you should quarantine. But in China it’s gotten to the point where 
they have to scan codes when they go into different buildings or when they go into 
certain streets, and you could be locked out if you’re on the list of people that’s 
been exposed. So you suddenly go into a society of total control, and that’s terribly 
worrying from the point of view of social and political liberties. But again, we have 
to face that all this information is out there, and if they wanted, the people running 
the Zoom platform could tell that the three of us are on their app now, extract what 
exactly we’re talking about, and they could even locate us from our phones—all of 
that information builds up. But virus tracing efforts need that information, so this 
is that double-edged sword that Heidegger talks about concerning technology—it’s 
created the framework inside which we live. We just have to be very careful that we 
know the essence of this technological enframing, and until we know what it’s doing 
to us in the long-term, we won’t really be able to get the right attitude towards it. 



13Issue VII ◆ Spring 2020

Interview with Dermot Moran

Clearly we can’t just be Luddites, but we also can’t blend completely into the security 
state as Agamben calls it. The long term impact will be this idea of the security state 
and ‘the state of exception’ that Agamben discusses. On the other side, we have to be 
aware of the people that are protesting any kind of a lockdown and gathering with 
their second amendment rights and their guns to say “nobody’s going to tell me what 
to do” (that’s a pretty American phenomenon by the way). But it is an example that 
comes from a deep-seated suspicion of anything having to do with the state, whether 
it be anarchist or libertarian in nature. The state is always repressive for these groups, 
so I think that at the end of the day we have to go somewhere in-between these two 
ideologies. It does raise all kinds of issues about political phenomenology, and this 
will lead us as a final point, it makes us focus on the nature of the life-world and how 
the life world is being mediated and structured by technological infringement. And 
they’re surely the central issues that Husserl and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty were 
talking about. From that point of view I think phenomenology is totally relevant to 
our discussions today. 

Dianoia: You’re an active member in mediating the dialogue between continental 
and analytic philosophy. Can you explain the difference between these two camps?

Moran: Well I wrote an article on it one time saying that “Our Germans Are Better 
Than Your Germans,” because the origins of analytic philosophy are german-speaking 
philosophers like Carnap or others in the Vienna Circle. I say German because they 
spoke in German, wrote in German, they were either in Germany or Austria. Carnap, 
Schlick and the Vienna Circle generally moved into America and influenced others like 
Quine and A.J. Ayer. Analytic philosophy then grew out from that breed of German 
scientific thought of the 20th century whereas Husserl and Heidegger influenced 
people like Gadamer, Arendt, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Kristeva and the more 
European thinkers that you tend to associate with continental philosophy. So I don't 
like the terms continental and analytic, but I do think there are different tendencies 
between thinkers of the 20th century, and what split them politically was the war—
this much is clear. Phenomenology became associated with Nazi Germany though 
Heidegger, and actually, a lot of the Vienna Circle people were Jews who had fled the 
Nazi regime, so they were very hostile not just to Nazism, but to anything that they 
thought was associated with it—and that included Heideggerian phenomenology in 
particular. But in the 21st century, we have to realize that both methods are really 
intersecting; in fact, cognitive science these days is a mixture of both continental 
and analytical methods. And also it’s a lot to do with people’s interests. If you go 
back to Aristotle and Plato, Plato wrote dialogues, which were very literary products, 
and Aristotle wrote these more textbook style lectures. And that’s interesting too, 
continental people tend to be more interested in the arts and literature, and analytic 
philosophers often want to be piggybacking on science, mathematics, logic and so 
on. So I don’t like it when people think that one is better than the other, and I do 



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

think they cover different aspects of the human experience. So I like to see room for 
both, but of course, as we know, because of the very complicated forms of technical 
language that have developed in the traditions, there’s very little genuine dialogue 
between them and I've been at it for a long time. In the end, I decided that what’s 
been going on are parallel conversations. So rather than people talking to each other, 
they’re talking about each other in parallel conversations, and that’s about as best as 
we can do. 

Dianoia: Another one of your areas of specialization is medieval philosophy—what 
initially attracted you to the subject and can you fathom a scenario wherein it would 
be in dialogue with phenomenology? 

Moran: I was really trying to write a dissertation on Heidegger for my PhD in 
1976 when he died, and everybody said that there was this massive Gesamtausgabe 
of collected works coming out, and that it was supposed to be the second part of 
Being and Time with all of these manuscripts making current Heidegger research 
impossible. So now we’ve had one-hundred volumes of Gasamtausgabe and I'm not 
really sure it’s changed all that much because people still read Being and Time! But 
at the time I wanted to work on Heidegger, and when he died, my supervisor said 
I shouldn't really work on him. I had a background from my undergraduate days 
in medieval philosophy, and I knew Heidegger had. So I said I want to work on a 
Heideggerian theme (viz. the forgetfulness of being in the history of philosophy in 
the medieval period) and that’s what led me to Meister Eckhart. I discovered that 
one of Eckhart’s sources was John Scottus Eriugena,  on whom I eventually wrote my 
PhD. So, in lots of ways, I was kind of emulating Heidegger (who wrote on Thomas 
of Erfurt for his Habilitation) and writing about a medieval scholar and trying to 
answer contemporary questions. Of course, it made me kind of an object of suspicion 
both by the Heideggerians and the Medievalists, so it was hard for me to keep these 
two different pathways of research open and in dialogue with each other. A lot of 
the medieval people were philologists and classicists who really didn’t want to talk 
about anything after the Middle Ages, or bring in any ideas from Hegel or Heidegger, 
or whoever. And similarly, phenomenologists wanted to talk about contemporary 
issues, and didn’t want to talk out the history of philosophy. But it’s changing, Jean-
Luc Marion is an example of someone who’s written on both as well, or Claude 
Romano who was here this past semester as our Visiting Gadamer Professor. ◆

Conducted on April 20th, 2020.


