John McMurtry is University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Canada. Most recently, he has focused his research on the value structure of economic theory and its consequences for global civil and environmental life. McMurtry was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in June 2001 by his peers for his outstanding contributions to the study of humanities and social sciences. McMurtry's principal research project in Philosophy spanning over seven years has followed from the invitation by the Secretariat of UNESCO/Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems to construct, author and edit Philosophy and World Problems as a multi-volume study of world philosophy. Three sub-volumes entitled "Western Philosophy and the Life-Ground", "Modes of Reason", and "Philosophy, Human Nature and Society" have been written with internationally distinguished philosophers contributing to five topic areas in each of these general fields. The central title study by McMurtry, entitled, "What is Good, What is Bad? The Value of All Values Across Time, Place and Theories", is an encompassing in-depth critical study of known world philosophies and fields to explain the inner logic of each canon and school in relationship to world problems across languages and eras including the method of life-value onto-axiology which is deployed to excavate, explain and resolve life-blind presuppositions of the world's major thought-systems from the ancients East and West to modern and contemporary philosophy.
McMurtry's recent research has focused on the underlying value structure of economic theory, its consequences for global civil and environmental life, and the life ground and civil commons. McMurtry considers the global free market "inefficient and life-destructive" in proportion to how unregulated it is by life needs and by life capital. In general, four principles of analysis and development are applied: the life-ground, life value, life capital, and civil commons. In Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market As An Ethical System, 1998, he examines the underlying value system of the global market and claims that it constructs the opposite of the "free and democratic society" it claims to bring about. In The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, 1999, he claims a propensity of human societies to assume the social order in which they live as good however life-destructive they may be, focusing on financial capitalism as displaying the hallmark characteristics of a cancer invasion at the social level of life organization. He conceives "the civil commons" as a social immune system. In Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy, 2002, he criticizes capitalist scientific technology, transnational trade apparatuses, NATO wars, and an expanding prison regime as symptoms of a "new totalitarianism cumulatively occupying the world and propelling civil and ecological breakdowns", and proposes constitutional standards of a "life economy". McMurtry has previously supported 9/11 conspiracy theories to explain the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. In one lecture, he drew comparisons to the event of the Reichstag fire and argued that the War in Afghanistan has been lobbied for and exploited by multinational corporations.
