Mark Wrathall (born February 1, 1965[1]) is Professor ofPhilosophy at theUniversity of Oxford and a fellow and tutor atCorpus Christi College, Oxford. He is considered a leading interpreter of the philosophy ofMartin Heidegger. Wrathall is featured inTao Ruspoli's filmBeing in the World. According to a reviewer, "Wrathall's writing is clear and comprehensive, ranging across virtually all of Heidegger's collected works.... Wrathall's overall interpretation of Heidegger's work is crystal clear, compelling, and relevant."[2]
Mark (Adam) Wrathall was born inProvo, Utah in 1965, and was raised in the towns ofGreece andPittsford in upstate New York. He spent his freshman year of high school atThe Ridings High School in Winterbourne, England, and graduated fromPittsford Mendon High School in 1983. He received a BA in philosophy atBrigham Young University in 1988. In 1991, he received both aJuris Doctor fromHarvard and an MA in philosophy fromBoston College. After clerking forCecil F. Poole at theU.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, he pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy from theUniversity of California at Berkeley, where he was a student of the Heidegger scholarHubert Dreyfus, graduating in 1996, with a disseration on “Unconcealment and Truth”.
From 1994 to 1996 he was a teaching fellow atStanford Law School. Afterwards, he taught at Brigham Young University from 1996 to 2006 (first in the political science department, then from 1999 in the philosophy department); he then joined the University of California, Riverside, where he served as Associate Professor from 2007 to 2009 and Professor of Philosophy from 2009 to 2017. Since 2017, he has been a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy atCorpus Christi College.
Wrathall's main interests includephenomenology,existentialism, the phenomenology ofreligion, and the philosophy of law, but he is best known for his work onMartin Heidegger.
Wrathall has also contributed to the philosophy of popular culture, editing a book on the philosophical themes found in the music ofU2[3] and publishing essays on film and philosophy. Wrathall's work on popular culture intersects with his interests in religion. He draws on Heidegger,Kierkegaard, andNietzsche to describe how secularism and technology undermine belief in objective eternal meanings and values. But Wrathall thinksnihilism also "opens up access to richer and more relevant ways for us to understand creation and for us to encounter the divine and the sacred."[citation needed]
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He is a member ofThe Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
