Professor Matthew Ratcliffe
Professor of Philosophy

Profile

Biography

After completing a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge in 1999, I taught at University College Cork, Durham University and, most recently, the University of Vienna, where I was Professor for Theoretical Philosophy and Head of Department. I joined the Philosophy Department at York as a Professor in September 2018.

Research

Overview

Most of my research falls within the areas of phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of medicine and health, and interdisciplinary emotion theory. In particular, I have sought to show how phenomenological research can be brought into dialogue with psychiatry, in ways that are mutually illuminating. In so doing, I have addressed puzzling forms of experience associated with diagnoses such as major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, and post-traumatic stress disorder. I have published on a range of related topics, including emotion, feeling and mood, empathy and interpersonal experience, hope and trust, perceptual experience, delusion, hallucination, and time-consciousness. In 2023, my colleague, Louise Richardson, and I completed a major four-year project on what it is to experience grief, entitled Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience.

I am the author of five books:

• Rethinking Commonsense Psychology (Palgrave, 2007)
• Feelings of Being (Oxford University Press, 2008)
• Experiences of Depression (Oxford University Press, 2015)
• Real Hallucinations (MIT Press, 2017)
• Grief Worlds (MIT Press, 2022)

Projects

My current research is focused around a book project on what it is to feel haunted in distinctively emotional ways and what these experiences can tell us about the sense of self. The book, provisionally entitled Feeling Haunted: A Phenomenology of the Emotional Self, is under contract with MIT Press and I expect to complete the manuscript during 2027. I also continue to work on topics such as the interpersonal and social dimensions of emotion regulation, the phenomenology of depression, what it is to experience loss, the phenomenology of trauma, and the nature of hope and trust. A theme that unites all of my work is the complex and dynamic phenomenology of possibility. 

Available PhD research projects

I welcome enquiries from prospective research students wishing to work on these and a range of other topics.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Most of my teaching addresses topics in the areas of phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, and emotion theory. I currently teach the second-year undergraduate module "Lived Experiences: An Introduction to Phenomenology" and the MA module "Phenomenology & Psychiatry". 

Postgraduate

I provide one-to-one supervision for PhD projects, as well as undergraduate and MA dissertations.

External activities

Editorial duties

I am on the editorial advisory committee of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences and have also served as an associate editor. I have refereed articles and manuscripts for over sixty journals and publishers.

Invited talks and conferences

I give frequent keynote and plenary lectures at conferences and workshops in the UK and overseas.