I am a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Stockholm University. My main research interests are in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, in particular philosophical issues pertaining to pictures and photographs (e.g. how to characterise and explain pictorial experience, and what's special about photography as a pictorial medium). Other areas of interest include selected topics in the philosophy of mind (especially imagination and perception) and in metaphysics (especially 'minor entities', such as shadows and other absences).

I received my PhD in Theoretical Philosophy from Stockholm University 2012. Between 2014 and 2020 I was teaching at the Department of Philosophy at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and before that held a position as an International Post-doc at Stockholm (funded by the Swedish Research Council) and was via that position also a Visiting Scholar at NYU (2013–2014).

Recent publications:

Pettersson, M. (2018) 'Seeing Depicted Space (or Not)', in Evaluative Perception, eds. A. Bergqvist and R. Cowan, Oxford University Press.

Pettersson, M. (2017) 'Capturing Shadows: On Photography, Causation and Absences', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 95(2), 256-269

Livingston, P. & M. Pettersson (2016) 'Thought Experiments in Aesthetics', in A Companion to Applied Philosophy, eds. K. Brownlee, D. Coady, and K. Lippert-Rasmussen, Wiley-Blackwell

Teaching
The bulk of my teaching has been in aesthetics, with a particular focus on philosophy and literature, and philosophy of pictures and photographs. The current semester (Fall 2020) I will primarily teach courses on philosophy of the cultural sciences.