Dr Orr is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity, a position he took up after four years as McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow in Theology, Ethics, and Public Life at Christ Church, Oxford. He holds a PhD and MPhil in Philosophy of Religion from the University of Cambridge and a BA in Classics from Balliol College, Oxford. Before entering academia, he worked for several years in corporate law at Freshfields and Sullivan & Cromwell.
Dr Orr''s research interests include Husserl and the background to early movements in German phenomenology; Heidegger's critiques of theology and Kant's pre-critical appeals to teleology; the union of mystical theology and scholastic metaphysics in Edith Stein's later writings; and, in the analytic tradition, contemporary debates between David Lewis and David Armstrong on the metaphysics of natural laws and causal powers.
Dr Orr is especially interested in research proposals exploring the philosophical traffic between continental phenomenology and the recovery of pre-modern metaphysical prisms - especially monotheistic ones - to account for laws, powers, causation, kinds, function, and conscious awareness itself. He was recently interviewed about his work by Richard Marshall for Philosophy at 3:AM.
