What you can expect from me

Philosophy in the making

I’m Ole Martin Moen, a Norwegian philosophy professor.

Here I will post on the various problems, questions, puzzles, and arguments that I’m grappling with in my work.

I have an ambitious aim: That my posts shall be interesting to philosophers and, at the same time, accessible to non-philosophers.

Me as an angel. Photo: Aleksander Sørlie

I have broad philosophical interests, albeit with an emphasis on issues in ethics (here are my papers).

Many of my posts will be related to the following two projects:

Philosophy in the Bible

I’m not religious. Neither is my colleague Einar Duenger Bohn, a philosopher working in metaphysics. Nevertheless, he and I recently spent 14 months reading the whole of the Bible, and discussed what we found philosophically interesting in a 48 episode podcast (in Norwegian, our native language). That was super-interesting, and it actually became Norway’s most listened-to academic podcast during those 14 months.

In the time ahead, I will write posts, in English, about our findings. Perhaps this will, in a year or two, result in a book.

The History of Hedonism

Hedonism is the theory that pleasure is the only thing that is good in and of itself. In contemporary philosophy, it often portrayed as a fringe theory, held by Epicurus and Jeremy Bentham, but by few others.

But this is completely wrong. Hedonism is one of the most widely held theories — if not the most widely held theory — of the good in the history of philosophy. Its proponents include, to name but those in the early modern period, Giordano Bruno, René Descartes, John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz, and Thomas Jefferson.

Hedonism’s history is largely unknown, even to professional historians of philosophy. To help remedy that, I will trace hedonism’s history from ancient India around 600 BCE until today. This might perhaps also, in a year or two, result in a book.

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