My main research interests lie in the assessment of rational persuasion, the way reasoning often (especially in philosophy) fails to fit the standard categories of deductive and inductive logic without forfeiting claims to intellectual rigour. This topic connects with my work relating philosophy to literature, for not only are the procedures of literary works closely analogous to those of the great philosophical classics, but the canons of literary criticism themselves have a direct bearing on the relations between dialectic and rhetoric. From these two central preoccupations my concerns ramify out in three directions: first, metaphor, narrative, hermeneutics and the philosophy of language (especially the interplay between semantics and pragmatics); second, the history of philosophy, the relations between metaphysics and ethics, and those between philosophy and theology; third, the application of philosophy to practical issues, especially in politics, morality and religion, with special attention to the transformative and persuasive powers of language.

Selected Publications:

• Ethics and Religion, Royal Institute of Philosophy & University of Warwick, 1984 [The analytical handbook for an experimental series of video tapes prepared with Sir Alfred Ayer and A. Phillips Griffiths]
• ‘Philosophy, Language, and the Reform of Public Worship’, in Philosophy and Practice, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths, Cambridge University Press, 1985
• 'On Not Deconstructing the Difference between Literature and Philosophy', Philosophy and Literature 13: 1, 1989, pp. 16-27
• Philosophical Finesse: Studies in the Art of Rational Persuasion, Clarendon Press, 1989 (Abstract)
• The Bible as Rhetoric: Studies in Biblical Persuasion and Credibility(ed.), Routledge, 1989
• 'Philosophy, Implicature and Liturgy', in Language and the Worship of the Church, ed. D. & R. Jasper, Macmillan, 1990
• Terrorism, Protest and Power (ed. with R. Crisp for the Society for Applied Philosophy), Elgar, 1990
• Addressing Frank Kermode: Essays in Criticism and Interpretation (ed. with M. Tudeau-Clayton), Macmillan, 1991
• Religion and Philosophy (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1992
• The Language of the Cave (ed. with A. Barker; Apeiron Special Issue), Academic Printing and Publishing, Alberta, 1993
• 'Rhetoric and Philosophy', Philosophy and Literature 19: 1, 1995, pp. 106-15
• 'Modes of Political Imagining', in Literature and the Political Imagination, ed. J. Horton and A. Baumeister, Routledge, 1996
• 'Paideia and an Ancient Quarrel', in Teaching Philosophy on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century, eds. D. Evans & I. Kucuradi, Meteksan, Ankara (for International Federation of Philosophical Societies), 1998
• 'Literature, Truth and Logic' , Philosophy 74, 1999, pp. 29-54
• A Philosophical Study of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, Mellen, 1999
• ‘Candlesticks in the Miasmal Mist: The Church and T. S. Eliot’, in Writing the Bodies of Christ: The Church from Carlyle to Derrida, ed. John Schad, Ashgate, 2001
• Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology: Reason, Meaning and Experience (ed. with K. Vanhoozer; for the similarly titled book series, see below), Ashgate, 2007
• 'Philosophy and Literature: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow', Ratio 22: 4, 2009, pp. 486-507; also in Philosophy of Literature, ed. S. Schroeder, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010
• 'Love and Transcendence', in Moral Powers, Fragile Beliefs: Essays in Moral and Religious Philosophy, ed. J. Carlisle, J. Carter and D. Whistler, Continuum, 2011
• 'T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets as Quartets: Four Voices in the Conversation of Mankind', Journal of the T.S. Eliot Society (UK), 3, 2011, pp. 47-70 (Abstract)
• ‘Reading the Bible “as the report of the Word of God”: The Case of T. S. Eliot’, Christianity and Literature 61: 4 2012, pp. 543-564
• The Aesthetics of Argument, Clarendon Press, 2016 (Abstract)
  
• Review of Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: A Philosophical Perspective, by Richard Gaskin (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), Mind 128: 511, 2019, pp. 993-1002

• I am general editor (with K. Vanhoozer) of the (primarily monograph) Routledge (previously Ashgate) series, Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology, of which the 2007 (edited) book listed above is the 'core' volume.

Martin Warner
Department of Philosophy University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL UK

martin.warner@warwick.ac.uk