Michael Marder

Michael Marder (born 1980) is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz. He works in the phenomenological tradition of Continental philosophy, environmental thought, and political philosophy.

Education Marder studied at universities in Canada and the U.S. He received his PhD in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Marder carried out post-doctoral research in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, and taught at Georgetown University, George Washington University, and St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan.

Career Marder carried out research in phenomenology as an FCT fellow at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and held the position of Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. before accepting the Ikerbasque research professorship at the University of the Basque Country.

Marder is an editorial associate of the journal Telos (New York) and an editor of two book series: Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy Series and Critical Plant Studies.

Much of his philosophical work has focused on building philosophies that take into account plants as beings with their own form of subjectivity, which has included showing how the field of philosophy, especially the tradition of continental philosophy, has neglected plants or treated them as "other", and how the field has been poorer for it. Dominic Pettman found Marder's book Plant-Thinking to be a work that made a substantial contribution to that nascent field, but also at times too simplistic, for example idealizing the ways that plants co-exist with other beings and not taking into account the ways that plants attack and defend against other beings.