Tilburg University

Faculty Member, Philosophy

Professor of Ethics

About

Alan Thomas is currently Professor of Ethics at Tilburg University in The Netherlands. His research interests are moral and political philosophy, epistemology and consciousness. His main publications are Value and Context (Oxford University Press, 2006), Bernard Williams (editor) (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Thomas Nagel, Acumen/McGill-Queen's University Press (2008).  He has previously held visiting appointments at UBC, Vancouver, Canada and the Murphy Institute, Tulane University, USA and has taught at the Universities of Oxford, Keele, Birmingham, KCL and Kent.

Thomas is currently working on two projects: the first is a book length defence of the strategy of embedding Rawls's conception of justice as fairness within a "liberal-republican" approach to political theory. While both Rawlsians and civic republicans have independently concluded that a property-owning democracy ought to be the ideal form of political economy for each theory, this can seem a mere coincidence. In Republic of Equals: Rawls, Meade and Property-owning democracy it is argued that this is no mere coincidence. Rawlsianism gives the Roman tradition of republicanism an independent standard for the fairness of its "contestatory fora" while the republican tradition gives Rawlsianism a more secure defence of the political liberties than Rawls's fair value proviso taken alone.

The second project is a book-length defence of moral particularism. The Verdict of Reasons argues that particularism is best supported by a Sellarsian emphasis on the priority of materially good to formally good reasoning and the fact that most reasoning about practice is non-monotonic. Combined with the thesis that the distinctive element of reasoning about practice is its termination by the act itself, it is argued both that this proves the need for a "catch all" capacity for practical decision and that we have a distinctive kind of first personal warrant for our actions. The first thesis poses a challenge to generalism; the latter poses a more specific challenge to impartial forms of generalism.

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