Kevin Morris
Research and personal page
I am associate professor of philosophy at Tulane University. I previously taught for one year at Northern Arizona University.
I enjoy fishing and played hockey until I moved to New Orleans.
I've collected happy cats since 2003 and adopted a wonderful dog in 2019.
I received my BA in Philosophy from The College of NJ in 2003 and my PhD in Philosophy from Brown University in 2011. My current "work" is focused on topics such as:
Supervenience, realization, and physicalism
Nonreductive physicalism and the causal exclusion problem
Consciousness, panpsychism, and physicalism
Fundamentality, grounding, and levels of reality
History of analytic philosophy (Bradley and Moore)
Relations and monistic metaphysics
I was faculty advisor for the Tulane Philosophy Club from 2012-2016, then again from 2018-2020, and resumed this role in Fall 2023.
In Fall 2018, I started collaborating with Project Lazarus on philosophy courses for its residents taught by Tulane students and affiliates and received a Tulane Center for Public Service grant for this in Spring 2019. Our work with Project Lazarus was featured in the Tulane School of Liberal Arts Magazine.
I've taught courses in elementary logic; intermediate/advanced logic; philosophy of mind; early analytic philosophy and I've run grad/undergrad seminars on phenomenalism, panpsychism, and neutral monism; realization and emergence; consciousness and fundamentality; language and ontology; levels of reality; monism and relations.
My CV, philpapers page, faculty page at Tulane.
Check out all of the great Spring 2024 philosophy courses at Tulane!
Check out my visit to PhilTalk, in which I rock a Pumpkins ZERO t shirt!
I can be reached at kevin.michael.morris AT gmail.com.
I am the author or coauthor of the following books:
Physicalism Deconstructed: Levels of Reality and the Mind-Body Problem (Cambridge, 2018) offers a critique and diagnosis of contemporary approaches to the metaphysics of physicalism, especially nonreductive or levels-based accounts. In doing so, it defends a form of reductive or one-level physicalism. Table of Contents; NDPR review by Jessica Wilson.
Elementary Symbolic Logic: Concepts, Techniques, and Context (Kendall Hunt, 2021) provides a rigorous but accessible introduction to symbolic logic and presents logic as an area of active research with a rich history. Table of Contents and Index (drafts). Please contact me with any questions about the book, how to use it for your courses, etc.
Early Analytic Philosophy: An Inclusive Reader with Commentary (with C. Preti) (Bloomsbury, 2023). This book has about 25 readings from roughly 1890-1950, along with about 180 pages of original discussion and commentary aimed at making this challenging material more accessible for students. It also aims to bring out the role of women philosophers in the development of the analytic tradition, featuring chapters on Constance Jones and Susan Stebbing. Table of Contents (draft!)
I am author or coauthor of the following articles:
Della Rocca's Relations Regress and Bradley's Relations Regresses, Acta Analytica (published version; penultimate draft)
What's Wrong With Nonreductive Physicalism? The Exclusion Problem Reconsidered, ProtoSociology (2023) (issue on the philosophy of J. Kim) (penultimate draft; final draft; full issue)
The Super Justification Argument for Phenomenal Transparency, Inquiry (2022) (online first published version here and here; penultimate draft)
Phenomenal Transparency and the Transparency of Subjecthood, Analysis (2021) (online first; penultimate draft)
Multiple Realization and Compositional Variation, Synthese 197 (2020) (online first published version and here; penultimate draft)
Truthmaking and the Mysteries of Emergence, in E. Vintiadis and C. Mekios (eds.), Brute Facts (Oxford, 2018; BJPS review) (penultimate draft)
Physicalism, Truthmaking, and Levels of Reality: Prospects and Problems, Topoi 37 (2018) (issue on physicalism) (published version; penultimate draft)
What's Wrong With Brute Supervenience? A Defense of Horgan on Physicalism and Superdupervenience, Analytic Philosophy 59 (2018) (published version; penultimate draft)
The Combination Problem: Subjects and Unity, Erkenntnis 82 (2017) (published version; penultimate draft)
Issues in Phenomenalist Metaphysics, Analysis 76 (2016) (part of a symposium on Pelczar's Sensorama; Pelczar's Precis and Replies) (published version; penultimate draft)
Russellian Physicalism, Bare Structure, and Swapped Inscrutables, Journal of Consciousness Studies 23 (2016) (published version; penultimate draft)
How to Read Moore's "Proof of an External World" (with C. Preti), Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 4 (2015) (here and here)
Against Disanalogy-Style Responses to the Exclusion Problem, Philosophia 43 (2015) (published version; penultimate draft)
Supervenience Physicalism, Emergentism, and the Polluted Supervenience Base, Erkenntnis 79 (2014) (published version; penultimate draft)
Causal Closure, Causal Exclusion, and Supervenience Physicalism, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (2014) (published version; penultimate draft)
On Two Arguments for Subset Inheritance, Philosophical Studies 163 (2013) (published version; penultimate draft)
A Defense of Lucky Understanding, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 63 (2012) (here)
Theoretical Identities as Explanantia and Explananda, American Philosophical Quarterly 48 (2011) (here)
Subset Realization, Parthood, and Causal Overdetermination, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92 (2011) (published version; penultimate draft)
Subset Realization and Physical Identification, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (2011) (published version; penultimate draft)
Guidelines for Theorizing About Realization, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 48 (2010) (published version; penultimate draft)
Does Functional Reduction Need Bridge Laws? A Response to Marras, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (2009) (here)