Alan Thomas

Faculty Fellow 2009-2010

Center for Ethics

Biography

Alan Thomas is Professor of Ethics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Previously, he was Head and Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent. Educated at Cambridge and Harvard as well as Oxford, where he completed a D.Phil under the supervision of the late Bernard Williams, Professor Thomas works on moral and political philosophy and the philosophy of mind. His current research interests are moral psychology (particularly virtue ethics), moral epistemology, moral reasoning, moral particularism, egalitarianism in political philosophy (particularly the work of Rawls) and theories of consciousness.

He is the author of Thomas Nagel (Acumen and McGill-Queens, 2008), Value and Context: The Nature of Moral and Political Knowledge (Clarendon, 2006), and the editor of Bernard Williams (Cambridge, 2007), as well as numerous other scholarly articles in leading journals.

Publications

Books: forthcoming

  • The Moral Psychology of Inequality [with Alfred Archer and Bart Engelen]
  • Ethics in the First Person: Moral Particularism and its Consequences, work in progress, ms currently 80 000 words.

 

Books: published 

  • 2017 Republic of Equals: Predistribution and Property-Owning Democracy – Oxford University Press (USA)
  • 2009/2015 Thomas Nagel, Originally published by Acumen Press and McGill/Queen’s University Press; now published by Routledge. Kindle edition 2015.
  • 2007 Bernard Williams (editor and contributor), Cambridge University Press. 
  • 2006/2010 Value and Context: the Nature of Moral and Political Knowledge, Oxford University Press (The Clarendon Press).  352pp. ISBN 0198250177. Paperback 2010.

 

Selected papers

  • 2015 ‘Integrity, Ground Projects and Reasons to be Moral’ in Beatrix Himmelmann and Burt Louden (eds) Why Be Moral?, De Gruyter, pp. 249–271.
  • 2014 ‘Should Generalism be Our Regulative Ideal?’ in T. D. C. Chappell (ed.) Intuition and Anti-Theory in Ethics, Oxford University Press. 
  • 2013 ‘Sen on Rawls’s “Transcendental Institutionalism”: An Analysis and Critique’, European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 241-263.
  • 2012 ‘Giving Each Her Due: Taurek Cases and Non-comparative Justice’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice vol. 15, issue 5, pp. 661-676.
  • 2011 ‘Another Particularism: Reasons, Status and Defaults’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 151-167.
  • 2009 'Perceptual Knowledge, Representation and Imagination' in 'Perceptual Intentionality: Themes from Sellars and McDowell', a special issue of Philosophical Topics.
  • 2003 'An Adverbial Theory of Consciousness', Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 2, no. 3 pp. 161-185.
  • 1997 'Kant, McDowell and the Theory of Consciousness' European Journal of Philosophy, (December) pp. 283-305.