Faculty Research Fellow
Mohan Matthen (UTM Philosophy; Ph.D. Stanford University, 1976) is Professor of Philosophy. His research interests include the philosophy of mind, especially perception, and the philosophy of biology. For the last few years, he has been writing about perception as directed activity we undertake in order to find out about the world. His recent publications include (among many others) Perception and its Modalities (co-edited with Stephen Biggs and Dustin Stokes; Oxford UP, 2014), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception (ed.; Oxford UP, 2015), and Seeing, Doing, and Knowing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception (Oxford UP, 2005). He held a twelve-month JHI Faculty Research Fellowship in 2010-2011.
What I'm working on: Place, Taste, and the Pleasure of Art
How do cultures construct the value of art (including music, visual and performing art, literature, etc.)? In particular, how are we to understand cultural difference? Why are the forms and tropes of one artistic milieu incomprehensible in others? My project makes hedonism the key to answering these questions: every artistic genre seeks to create pleasure in its own distinctive way. Hedonism has largely been discredited in philosophy. Here, I seek to reconstruct its foundations in a way that allows it to be applied to art. I start with a novel and original account of aesthetic pleasure itself, and draw on theoretical resources from philosophy, psychology, and social science to understand cultural construction and the emergence of cultural difference.