Mark L. Johnson

Degree (Year)
Email: markj@uoregon.edu
Phone: (541) 346-5548
Website: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~uophil/faculty/mjohnson/mjohnson.html

I have been fortunate to teach topics in several areas of philosophy and to be involved in a considerable amount of interdisciplinary collaboration. One cluster of courses centers around issues of cognition, meaning, and language and includes Philosophy of Language, Metaphor, and Philosophy and Cognitive Science. My Philosophy of Language course includes speech act theory and recent work on the embodied and imaginative character of meaning and language.

The seminar on Philosophy and Cognitive Science is an ongoing investigation of how empirical research from the cognitive sciences has profound implications for our understanding of philosophy. A second focus is the philosophy of art, including courses in aesthetics, philosophy of art, and music and meaning. A third area is Kant studies, where I regularly teach one course on Kant's Moral Theory and another on Kant's Aesthetic Theory. I'm particularly interested in his treatment of imagination and reflective judgment. I do my best to defend Kant against facile criticisms, but I do not hesitate to suggest aspects of Kant's views that need to be reconstructed in light of recent work on mind and language.

In my fourth area, moral philosophy, besides the course on Kant's ethics I offer a seminar on Recent Moral Theory that emphasizes work over the past three decades. Most recently my focus has been on naturalistic views of ethics. Finally, I have an abiding interest in American Philosophy, especially Pragmatism. Although I've never taught a course on Pragmatism, I often incorporate pragmatist writings into my courses. For example, in my Recent Moral Theory seminar I included Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, as a basis for thinking about ethical naturalism.