Eric James Morelli, Ph.D.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Dr. Eric James Morelli pursued a passion for poetry to the Bronx. He soon discovered there at Fordham some of his limits as a poet and a tendency he had to prefer form to content. He had long had an interest in music so he turned his attention there. He wondered what song he should make and how, why certain songs sound good, why anyone should make a song. His passion, he realized, was philosophical; his questions about art, inspired by more fundamental questions about questions, about how we might know we know and how we go about “knowing” in the first place. In Plato, Husserl, and Lonergan, he discerned a kindred commitment to those questions and a potential for answers, and he went to Emory in Atlanta to continue his study of Plato and phenomenology and to broaden and deepen his grasp of philosophy’s history. He met his future wife, PLNU’s Dr. Margarita Pintado, at Emory, taught there and at Morehouse, and successfully defended a dissertation on Plato’s notion of opinion in the Timaeus and Critias, two of Plato’s last and historically most influential dialogues. He moved with his wife to Arkadelphia, Arkansas, where they taught at rival universities and welcomed their first child. In 2018, he and his wife returned to southern California, joined the faculty at PLNU, and welcomed their second child. Still pursuing answers to the questions that drove him to philosophize, Dr. Morelli has published and presented numerous articles and talks on Plato, Neoplatonism, phenomenology, and Lonergan’s critical realism and is currently focused on further exposing and exploring the interiority of the Platonic dialogues.