Irene McMullin
I am a Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophical, Historical, and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex. I am primarily interested in questions of personhood, agency, and self-becoming - espeically the role that other people play in those things. Though I specialise in Existentialism and Phenomenology, I draw inspiration from both Continental and Analytic approaches. I am currently pursuing research into the phenomenology of ideality and the role that encounters with the good play in the functioning of practical agency, along with work on psychoanalytic theory.
Key Research Interests:
Existentialism and Phenomenology
Ethics (especially virtue ethics and Kantian ethics), Moral Psychology
Qualifications
Key Research Interests:
Existentialism and Phenomenology
Ethics (especially virtue ethics and Kantian ethics), Moral Psychology
Qualifications
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Books by Irene McMullin
Abstract:
By putting existential phenomenology into conversation with virtue ethics, this book offers a new interpretation of human flourishing. It rejects characterizations of flourishing as either a private subjective state or an objective worldly status, arguing that flourishing is rather a successfully negotiated self-world fit – a condition involving both the essential dependence of the self upon the world and others, and the lived normative responsiveness of the agent striving to be in the world well. A central argument of the book is that there is an irreducible normative plurality arising from the different practical perspectives we can adopt – the first, second, and third-person stances – all of which make different kinds of normative claim that we understand ourselves as having reason to meet. Flourishing is human excellence within each of these normative domains (self-fulfillment, moral responsibility, and responsiveness to intersubjective standards) achieved in such a way that success in one domain does not compromise success in another. Existential Flourishing provides a correspondingly transformed interpretation of the virtues as solutions to various existential problems we face in responding to these normative domains. The book also addresses traditional problems in virtue ethics and analyzes the structure of four virtues in detail: justice, patience, modesty, and courage.
Reviews:
'In its overall theory of ethical virtue and in its analyses of specific virtues, Existential Flourishing is an innovative and acutely insightful work of philosophy. The book admirably exemplifies the virtues of sharply analytical ethical theorising that is sensitive to the complex structures of human existence. It is replete with interesting and perceptive thoughts, developed through detailed engagement with landmark classics of analytic moral philosophy and European existential philosophy. Philosophers interested in ethical theory, existential philosophy, or both will want to engage with this book’s substantive arguments and its methodology. In this way, anglophone ethical theory can be further enriched by existential philosophy'.
Jonathan Webber - The Philosophical Quarterly
‘Irene McMullin’s Existential Flourishing: A Phenomenology of the Virtues is richly layered and deftly argued. The layers include detailed elucidation of practical rationality, references to previous debates in virtue ethics, and proposals plucked out of Levinas, Nietzsche, Kant, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Heidegger, and Husserl. Despite the heaviness of these many materials, McMullin writes with such dexterity as to encourage light and easy reflection right alongside her lapidary precision.Her style can also be warm and wry, as a line about “considering the moral reprobates that many of us count as friends” attests (143). [...] I am very grateful for this book’s insights and for how philosophical argumentation is used to open up explanations of what we are doing. I have shared McMullin’s definition of patience with an online group of transplant patient caretakers, who expressed great appreciation for it. Is there a better sign than that?’
Jennifer Baker - Ethics
Papers by Irene McMullin
This chapter examines ideals and the role that concrete exemplary value experiences play in both shaping the models through which we are oriented towards ideals, and our understanding of the ideals themselves. It considers how the existentialist emphasis on negative value experiences-specifically, Sartre's notion of the 'slimy'plays a role in viewing the ideal self-world relationship as one of dominance and the corresponding ideal self-relation as one of autonomous self-grounding. The suffocating horror of the slimy gives one a taste of the Sartrean ontological anti-ideal, whereby freedom is consumed by being but still retains the awareness necessary to experience its own dissolution. This experience of suffocation and exile in the midst of hostile being correspondingly grounds Sartre's understanding of the ontological ideal-namely, freedom's triumphant self-grounding. The chapter concludes by considering the implications of a different kind of exemplary value eventnamely, one in which self and world are experienced as existing in a harmony that challenges the hostile model on which Sartre's understanding of the ideal is founded. Positive value experiences such as beauty suggest a different way of understanding the ideal relationship between self and world. By emphasizing the import of such positive value experiences, the sharp divide between autonomous and heteronomous approaches is put in question, and with it, the nihilism and decisionism that continues to haunt existentialist ethics.
its pursuit.
intention is best understood in terms of the most fundamental mode in which
we experience such fulfilment: the expression of the‘I can’ through the
responsivity of the lived body. Despite his early tendency to understand fulfilment
primarily in terms of linguistic or logical meaning-identity, it is my contention that
Husserl’s later work should be viewed as increasingly characterizing the core
meaning of fulfilment in terms of practical agency accomplishing its intentionality
through the body that enacts and confirms that intentionality—although it is far
from clear that Husserl himself recognized this direction in which his own
phenomenological analyses were leading him. The central meaning of fulfilment,
I will argue, is realized intentionality—and on the most basic level, the unity of
intention and realization is experienced in the practical‘holding sway’ of the ego
in the lived body. Thus, the unity of self qua ego and self qua lived body that
occurs in practical agency involves a prethematic experience of identity between
intention and its fulfilling intuition—an identity that serves as the basis for all
higher order fulfilment experiences. The empty/fulfilled structure has its genetic
and transcendental‘origin’ in embodiment and its various levels of agential
satisfaction or dissatisfaction. As a result, the experience of ego–Leib unity
underwrites our practical understanding of all other experiences of fulfilment.
nature of identity can inhibit the possibility of genuine love. Since we must depend on the freedom of others to show us who we are, the uncertainty this introduces into one’s sense of self can trigger anxiety and pathological attempts to control those others upon whom one’s self-value depends. In jealousy one tries to possess the other person’s freedom in the hopes that a constant positive evaluation can be thereby secured. The belief that one is entitled to the self-perfection that such affirmation promises reveals both the important existential role that the beloved plays in the jealous person’s psychic
structure and the manner in which gender inequalities can promote such distortions of love.
Abstract:
By putting existential phenomenology into conversation with virtue ethics, this book offers a new interpretation of human flourishing. It rejects characterizations of flourishing as either a private subjective state or an objective worldly status, arguing that flourishing is rather a successfully negotiated self-world fit – a condition involving both the essential dependence of the self upon the world and others, and the lived normative responsiveness of the agent striving to be in the world well. A central argument of the book is that there is an irreducible normative plurality arising from the different practical perspectives we can adopt – the first, second, and third-person stances – all of which make different kinds of normative claim that we understand ourselves as having reason to meet. Flourishing is human excellence within each of these normative domains (self-fulfillment, moral responsibility, and responsiveness to intersubjective standards) achieved in such a way that success in one domain does not compromise success in another. Existential Flourishing provides a correspondingly transformed interpretation of the virtues as solutions to various existential problems we face in responding to these normative domains. The book also addresses traditional problems in virtue ethics and analyzes the structure of four virtues in detail: justice, patience, modesty, and courage.
Reviews:
'In its overall theory of ethical virtue and in its analyses of specific virtues, Existential Flourishing is an innovative and acutely insightful work of philosophy. The book admirably exemplifies the virtues of sharply analytical ethical theorising that is sensitive to the complex structures of human existence. It is replete with interesting and perceptive thoughts, developed through detailed engagement with landmark classics of analytic moral philosophy and European existential philosophy. Philosophers interested in ethical theory, existential philosophy, or both will want to engage with this book’s substantive arguments and its methodology. In this way, anglophone ethical theory can be further enriched by existential philosophy'.
Jonathan Webber - The Philosophical Quarterly
‘Irene McMullin’s Existential Flourishing: A Phenomenology of the Virtues is richly layered and deftly argued. The layers include detailed elucidation of practical rationality, references to previous debates in virtue ethics, and proposals plucked out of Levinas, Nietzsche, Kant, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Heidegger, and Husserl. Despite the heaviness of these many materials, McMullin writes with such dexterity as to encourage light and easy reflection right alongside her lapidary precision.Her style can also be warm and wry, as a line about “considering the moral reprobates that many of us count as friends” attests (143). [...] I am very grateful for this book’s insights and for how philosophical argumentation is used to open up explanations of what we are doing. I have shared McMullin’s definition of patience with an online group of transplant patient caretakers, who expressed great appreciation for it. Is there a better sign than that?’
Jennifer Baker - Ethics
This chapter examines ideals and the role that concrete exemplary value experiences play in both shaping the models through which we are oriented towards ideals, and our understanding of the ideals themselves. It considers how the existentialist emphasis on negative value experiences-specifically, Sartre's notion of the 'slimy'plays a role in viewing the ideal self-world relationship as one of dominance and the corresponding ideal self-relation as one of autonomous self-grounding. The suffocating horror of the slimy gives one a taste of the Sartrean ontological anti-ideal, whereby freedom is consumed by being but still retains the awareness necessary to experience its own dissolution. This experience of suffocation and exile in the midst of hostile being correspondingly grounds Sartre's understanding of the ontological ideal-namely, freedom's triumphant self-grounding. The chapter concludes by considering the implications of a different kind of exemplary value eventnamely, one in which self and world are experienced as existing in a harmony that challenges the hostile model on which Sartre's understanding of the ideal is founded. Positive value experiences such as beauty suggest a different way of understanding the ideal relationship between self and world. By emphasizing the import of such positive value experiences, the sharp divide between autonomous and heteronomous approaches is put in question, and with it, the nihilism and decisionism that continues to haunt existentialist ethics.
its pursuit.
intention is best understood in terms of the most fundamental mode in which
we experience such fulfilment: the expression of the‘I can’ through the
responsivity of the lived body. Despite his early tendency to understand fulfilment
primarily in terms of linguistic or logical meaning-identity, it is my contention that
Husserl’s later work should be viewed as increasingly characterizing the core
meaning of fulfilment in terms of practical agency accomplishing its intentionality
through the body that enacts and confirms that intentionality—although it is far
from clear that Husserl himself recognized this direction in which his own
phenomenological analyses were leading him. The central meaning of fulfilment,
I will argue, is realized intentionality—and on the most basic level, the unity of
intention and realization is experienced in the practical‘holding sway’ of the ego
in the lived body. Thus, the unity of self qua ego and self qua lived body that
occurs in practical agency involves a prethematic experience of identity between
intention and its fulfilling intuition—an identity that serves as the basis for all
higher order fulfilment experiences. The empty/fulfilled structure has its genetic
and transcendental‘origin’ in embodiment and its various levels of agential
satisfaction or dissatisfaction. As a result, the experience of ego–Leib unity
underwrites our practical understanding of all other experiences of fulfilment.
nature of identity can inhibit the possibility of genuine love. Since we must depend on the freedom of others to show us who we are, the uncertainty this introduces into one’s sense of self can trigger anxiety and pathological attempts to control those others upon whom one’s self-value depends. In jealousy one tries to possess the other person’s freedom in the hopes that a constant positive evaluation can be thereby secured. The belief that one is entitled to the self-perfection that such affirmation promises reveals both the important existential role that the beloved plays in the jealous person’s psychic
structure and the manner in which gender inequalities can promote such distortions of love.