Prf Derek Matravers

Professor Of Philosophy

derek.matravers@open.ac.uk

Biography

Professional biography

Derek Matravers read for a degree in Philosophy at University College, London, after which he completed a PhD at Darwin College, Cambridge. He was supervised by Hugh Mellor on the topic of ‘Art and the Emotions’. He spent a further three years in Cambridge as a post-doctoral Research Fellow before moving to The Open University in 1994. He has written on various areas of aesthetics and the philosophy of art, as well as in ethics and the philosophy of mind.

He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.

He has held visiting positions at the University of Latvia, the University of British Columbia, the University of Otago, Shanghai Normal University, Rhodes University (South Africa), and The University of Auckland.

Research interests

Matravers has published six books: Art and Emotion (OUP, 1998); Reading Political Philosophy: Machiavelli to Mill (with Jon Pike and Nigel Warburton) (Routledge, 2000); Introducing Philosophy of Art: Eight Case Studies, (Routledge, 2013); Fiction and Narrative (OUP, 2014); Empathy (Polity, 2017); and Stones and Lives: The Ethics of Protecting Heritage in War (OUP, 2024), written with Helen Frowe.

He has edited five collections of papers: Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy (with Jon Pike) (Routledge, 2003); Figuring Out Figurative Art (with Damien Freeman) (Routledge, 2014); Philosophical Perspectives on Empathy (with Anik Waldow) (Routledge, 2018); Heritage in War: Ethical Issues (with William Bulow, Helen Frowe, and Joshua Lewis Thomas) (OUP, 2023); and The Expression of Emotion in the Visual Arts (with Vanessa Brassey) (Routledge, 2025).

He has published around 100 papers and book chapters.

He is the Series Editor of the highly successful Bloomsbury Aesthetics series.

Along with Paloma Atencia-Linares, of UNED, he edits The British Journal of Aesthetics and is an Associate Editor of AI and Society.

Along with Alessandra Marino and Natalie Trevino, he directs the OU Space Ethics Group.

He serves on the Executive Committee of the Royal Music Association Music and Philosophy Study Group.

He is an elected member of the Steering Group of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy.

Matravers is interested in supervising graduate students in aesthetics, the philosophical issues around heritage and conservation, and the ethics of space exploration.

Current Graduate Students

Alessio Antonini: 'Reading as a Technology: An Integrative Theory of Reading Experience for Digital Humanities'

Claudia Giupponi: 'How does Renaissance Intarsia Relate to the 'Fine Arts'?

Bob Watt: 'Salvador Dali, Illusionist or Magician? Perception and Phenomenology of Selected Works by Salvador Dali'

Alec Schulz: 'The Aesthetic Experience and Content of Magic'

Teaching interests

Most recently Matravers has written for the Philosophy MA, writing about Environmental Aesthetics and about Consciousness.

Projects

BA Early Career Regional Event

This is an initial proposal to the British Academy for the organisation of an early career regional event to be branded as a British Academy event, but organised by the proposer, with assistance from the Academy. This is an extremely short call (3 weeks) with immediate deadline. The budget can be up to £10k.

Sympathy and Its Reflections in History

This pilot project investigates sympathy (the original of the modern ‘empathy’) from antiquity to modernity by putting into dialogue philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis and classics. This unusual interdisciplinary approach aims to unlock the meaning of the concept for debates in the humanities and social sciences. Its historical-anthropological and conceptual-analytic methodology approaches history though our ability to project ourselves into other times and places, clarifying how sympathy functions in understanding others while also revealing under which premises historical understandings of sympathy have been re-written and the phenomena that sympathy describes have been conceptualised. Analysis of sympathy and its connection with the imagination and with empathy brings closer an understanding of cultural and historical differences in social, moral and aesthetic practices and offers a specific link between the study of history and culture and empirical social psychology, politics, and other qualitative-quantitative social sciences.