Dr Manuel Dries

Professional biography

Manuel Dries (PhD Cambridge) is Senior Lecurer of Philosophy in the School of Social Sciences and Global Studies at The Open University. He is currently Philosophy's Director of Research and Unit of Assessment Lead for REF2029. He was Head of Department from 2017-2023. Previously he held Research Fellowships at the University of Oxford and the French CNRS. He is an affiliated member of Oxford’s Faculty of Philosophy and Wolfson College.

Research interests

Research Interests: post-Kantian European philosophy, philosophy of mind, ethics, aesthetics.

Manuel Dries focuses on questions at the interface between metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of mind. He has a particular interest in the history of post-Kantian European philosophy and its contributions to contemporary debates in those fields. Recent publications include Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind (ed., De Gruyter 2018), Nietzsche on Mind and Nature (ed. with P. Kail, OUP 2015), a set of three articles on value creation in the journal Nietzsche-Studien 44 (2015); and the journal articles 'memento mori – memento vivere. Early Nietzsche on History, Embodiment and Value' in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, and 'Metaphysician, Philosopher, Psychologist? Making Sense of Nietzsche's Sense-Making', in Philosophical Topics 43 (2015). He is currently working on a monograph on Nietzsche's Conception of Freedom and Agency.

Publications: For access to publications and events, please to my research archive on Academia.edu or Philpapers.org

Teaching interests

Manuel Dries has lectured on Nietzsche (Universities of Cambridge and Oxford), Self and World from Kant to Nietzsche, Fichte and Early Romantic Philosophy, and Schopenhauer at the University of Oxford (2007–2013). He has taught graduate classes and research seminars on philosophical aesthetics and 19th and 20th-century European philosophy. He is co-founder and co-convenor (with Jospeh Schear and Mark Wrathall) of the Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar series at the University of Oxford (since 2010) and a member of the Values and Reasons Research Cluster at The Open University. In 2017 he gave a lecture series on Nietzsche's Philosophical Anthropology at Beijing's Renmin University as part of the UK-China Philosophy Summer School. He has been Visiting Professor at Tongji University, Shanghai, in 2017 and taught a Masterclass on Nietzsche's Genealogy (with H. Heit and U.A. Sommer) in December 2019.

For The Open University Manuel Dries has been a member of the module team that oversaw the interdisciplinary module A207 From Enlightenment to Romanticism c.1780–1830 (Deputy Chair 2014–16). From 2015–2018 he was Module Chair of A333: Key Questions in Philosophy. He is a contributing author to the Open University's MA in Philosophy on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality. In 2019 he acted as Lead Academic for Global Ethics: An Introduction, freely available on FutureLearn. He is currently working on teaching materials on 'Freedom from Kant to de Beauvoir' for the new third-level philosophy.

Impact and engagement

Manuel Dries regularly acted as Academic advisor for the BBC. He advised on BCC Ideas and the BBC Four series Genius of the Modern World: Nietzsche (IMDB). Between 2008 and 2011 he participated in a number of European Commission projects related to Digital Research Infrastructures (DISCOVERY Project; NietzscheSource), Semantic Web, and Open Access in Philosophy (Agora. Scholarly Open Access Research in European Philosophy CIP-ICT PSP-2010-4, no: 270904).