James Murphy, S.J., PhD

Associate Professor

Bio

James (Séamus) G. Murphy, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, joined the faculty in 2009. His MA thesis (1987) was in philosophy of mind, on the work of Jerry Fodor. He doctoral thesis (University of Maryland 2001) was in philosophy of science, on the constitutive a priori in the early work of Rudolf Carnap.

He taught philosophy at Milltown Institute, Dublin, Ireland 1987-1990 and 1996-2008. He is a qualified high school teacher, and has an MDiv (theology). He is a Catholic priest and a member of the Jesuit order.

He is the author of a course textbook in philosophy of science (2006) for a distance learning B.A. in Philosophy; the book War's Ends (Georgetown UP, 2014); the e-book Philosophy and Person (Kendall Hunt, 2019), a course textbook designed for Loyola’s PHIL 130. His latest book Confronting the Irish Past (Anthem, 2024) is an interdisciplinary work in philosophy of history and the ethics of social memory.

He has published articles on the metaphysics of action, the science-religion relation, virtue ethics, causation, and epistemology. He has also written philosophy articles on a range of public policy issues.

Education

PhD, University of Maryland, USA.

Research Interests

Metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, moral epistemology, philosophy of history and memory.