Professor Mark Wynn completed his BA in Philosophy & Theology at the University of Oxford, and then a DPhil, again at Oxford, under the supervision of Brian Davies and Richard Swinburne.
Professor Wynn has held positions at King’s College, London, the University of Glasgow, where he was a Gifford Postdoctoral Research Fellow, the Australian Catholic University, the University of Exeter, and most recently the University of Leeds, where he was Professor of Philosophy and Religion from 2013 to 2020.
Professor Wynn is interested in philosophical theology broadly defined. In recent years, his research has focused upon questions such as: the distinctive character of the goods to which religious and spiritual traditions are directed; the structure of such traditions, including the connection between their practical and creedal commitments; the relationship between the various vocabularies that are used to describe, from the insider’s perspective, progress in the spiritual life; the epistemic significance of tradition in religious contexts; and the relationship between the concept of God and accounts of spiritual well-being.
In general, his research rests on the thought that religious traditions constitute extended experiments in human possibilities – and the belief that in some cases, the careful retrieval of those traditions can throw new light on contemporary questions about how to live well.
Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding: Integrating Perception, Conception and Feeling (Cambridge UP, 2005).
Faith and Place: An Essay in Embodied Religious Epistemology (Oxford UP, 2009).
Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life (Oxford UP, 2013).
Spiritual Traditions and the Virtues: Living Between Heaven and Earth (Oxford UP, 2020).