Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton
Born
Timothy Bloxam Morton

(1968-06-19) 19 June 1968 (age 56)
London, England
Alma materMagdalen College, Oxford
EraContemporary philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolSpeculative realism
Main interests
Metaphysics, realism, ecocriticism, object-oriented ontology, Buddhism
Notable ideas
Hyperobjects, realist magic, mesh, strange strangers, symbiotic real[1]

Timothy Bloxam Morton (born 19 June 1968)[2] is a professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University.[3] A member of the object-oriented philosophy movement, Morton's work explores the intersection of object-oriented thought and ecological studies. Morton's use of the term 'hyperobjects' was inspired by Björk's 1996 single 'Hyperballad', although the term 'Hyper-objects' (denoting n-dimensional non-local entities) has also been used in computer science since 1967.[4] Morton uses the term to explain objects so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localization, such as climate change and styrofoam.[5]

Morton's book Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People explores the separation between humans and non-humans and from an object-oriented ontological perspective, arguing that humans need to radically rethink the way in which they conceive of, and relate to, non-human animals and nature as a whole, going on to explore the political implications of such a change.[6] Morton has also written extensively about the literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, Romanticism, diet studies, and ecotheory.[7] Morton is faculty in the Synthetic Landscapes postgraduate program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).[8]

  1. ^ Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (13 December 2016). "Timothy Morton: Ecology Without Nature". CCCB LAB.
  2. ^ "Morton, Timothy, 1968-". Library of Congress. Retrieved 2014-07-22. Timothy Bloxam Morton; b. 6/19/68
  3. ^ "Rice Faculty Page". Retrieved 2012-06-20.
  4. ^ Noll, A. Michael (August 1967). "A Computer Technique for Displaying n-Dimensional Hyperobjects". Communications of the ACM. 10 (8): 469–473. doi:10.1145/363534.363544. S2CID 6677741.
  5. ^ Morton (2010), p. 130.
  6. ^ Smith, P. D. (20 January 2018). "Being Ecological by Timothy Morton review – a playfully serious look at the environment". the Guardian. Retrieved 2018-10-10.
  7. ^ "UC-Davis Faculty Page". Archived from the original on 2011-11-23. Retrieved 2011-11-23.
  8. ^ "SCI-Arc launches new program on emerging topics in landscape architecture". The Architect’s Newspaper. 5 December 2019. Retrieved 2021-01-14.