Edward F. Mooney is an internationally noted Kierkegaard scholar. He was Professor of Religion and Philosophy through 2013 at Syracuse University. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Oberlin College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from University of California, Santa Barbara. His dissertation, written under Herbert Fingarette, linked studies of philosophical themes in literature with the turn toward persons in the work of Austin, P. F. Strawson and Iris Murdoch. Mooney was a Professor of Philosophy at Sonoma State University from 1975 until 2002. While there he published books on Kierkegaard and several smaller studies. He then migrated to Syracuse University where his writing expanded to include studies of American Philosophy. Mooney was President of the North American Kierkegaard Society for several years, in which capacity he lectured in Vilnia, Frankfurt, Reykjavik, Jerusalem, Ber-Shiva, Tel Aviv, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Auburn, and elsewhere. He became Professor Emeritus at Syracuse in 2013 and during 2013-2015 was a visiting professor at Tel-Aviv and at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, teaching seminars in American Studies on Thoreau. He presently resides and teaches in Portland, Maine. He was a regular contributor to the interdisciplinary on-line journal Zeteo. His writing exemplifies the intersections among philosophy, religion, and poetry. One finds the clarity of Anglophone ordinary language philosophy joined to issues native to existential philosophy and religion. In recent years he has turned to Melville as exemplifying an informal and episodic conversationally developed philosophy well-suited to literary exposition and wisdom, embodying what Cavell calls "passionate speech." His work has appeared in Japanese, Portuguese, French, Hebrew, and Spanish translation.
Mooney has published over one hundred articles and reviews on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Cavell, Henry Bugbee, Rorty, Pippin, Melville, Thoreau, Henry James, Erik Erikson, Kristeva, and Gilligan. His work has been translated into Japanese, French, Portuguese, Persian, Spanish, and Hebrew. Excerpts from "Postcards Dropped in Flight" were listed under "Best Essays of 1998". He is the most cited author in The Oxford Companion of Kierkegaard, and The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling.
Lectures
Mooney has given invited lectures across the USA and in Iceland, England, Germany, Israel, and Lithuania. He was invited to deliver the first Utech Memorial Lectures at the St. Olaf International Kierkegaard Conference, 2011. A Festschrift was held in his honor at the meetings of the American Academy of Religion, 2011. He is Past-President of the North American Kierkegaard Society.
