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Professor Eric Matthews

Professor Eric Matthews email: e.matthews@abdn.ac.uk

Professor Eric Matthews is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and is currently an Honorary Research Professor of Medical Ethics and the Philosophy of Psychiatry in the Department. He studied both as an undergraduate and a postgraduate at Oxford, but his career has been spent mainly in Aberdeen, apart from two visiting appointments at universities in the United States.

Eric Matthews’ main research interests lie in two areas: the philosophy and ethics of medicine, especially psychiatry; and twentieth century French philosophy. He is an internationally recognized figure in the rapidly expanding field of the philosophy of psychiatry, in which he continues to publish and to speak at international conferences. In the last few years, he has given invited papers at conferences in Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, South Africa, and the UK, and recently was a keynote speaker at a workshop organised by the Wellcome Trust on the ethics of psychiatry. He is a member of the National Committee of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Philosophy Special Interest Group, and of the Steering Committee for the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry.

Recent and forthcoming publications in this field include: "Mental and Physical Illness: An Unsustainable Separation?" (in Eastman and Peay (eds), Law without Enforcement, Oxford, Hart Publishing, 1999); "Moral Vision and the Idea of Mental Illness" (PPP:Philosophy, Psychiatry, Psychology, 6, 4, 1999); "Autonomy and the Psychiatric Patient" (Journal of Applied Philosophy, 17, 1, 2000); "Personal Identity and Mental Health" (in Thomasma, Weisstub and Hervé (eds), Personhood and Health Care, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 2001); "How can a mind be sick?" (in Fulford, Sadler and Stanghellini (eds), Nature and Narrative (Oxford, OUP, 2003); "Merleau-Ponty’s Body-Subject and Psychiatry" (International Review of Psychiatry, 16, 2004); "Suspicions of Schizophrenia" (in Chung et al. (eds), The Philosophical Understanding of Schizophrenia, OUP, forthcoming); "Dementia and the Identity of the Person", (in Hughes et al. (eds), Dementia: Mind, Meaning and the Person, Oxford, OUP, forthcoming); and a monograph Body-Subjects and Disordered Minds, Oxford, OUP, forthcoming). A publication of related interest is a monograph on Mind, forthcoming in the "Key Concepts in Philosophy" series published by Continuum Press (London and New York).

In the broader field of medical ethics, recent research activities include participation in two research groups on the ethics of communicating genetic information, funded by the Wellcome Trust, acting as ethical advisor to a research project on data management committees, and directing an international and interdisciplinary research project on ethical and policy issues in the forthcoming crisis of aging. The outcome of the last-named project was a report, which has now been accepted for publication by the Nuffield Trust, the funders of the project. Professor Matthews has also been appointed as ethical consultant to a Dutch research project on the problems of health care for an aging population, funded by the Dutch government.

His interest in modern French philosophy is centred above all on three authors, Bergson, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. He has produced two books in this area in recent years – Twentieth Century French Philosophy, published by OUP in 1996, and The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, published by Acumen Publishing in 2002. Other publications include "Bergson’s Concept of a Person" (in John Mullarkey (ed), The New Bergson, Manchester UP, 1999); "Temporality, Subjectivity and History in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology" (Philosophical Inquiry, Vol. XXI, 1999); "Maurice Merleau-Ponty" (in Companion to Modern French Thought, Routledge, 2004); "Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception" (in J. Shand (ed), Central Works of Philosophy, Vol. 4, forthcoming, Acumen Publishing); and Merleau-Ponty: A Guide for the Perplexed (forthcoming, Continuum Press).

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