Professor Of Philosophy And (Former) Head Of Department (2016–20).
CurrentEducated at Cambridge, Harvard (as a Kennedy Scholar), and Oxford Universities Alan Thomas has held visiting appointments at the University of British Columbia (2007-8), a Fellowship at the Murphy Institute of Tulane University (2009-10), was a School Visitor at the ANU (2013) and was a Visiting Research Professor at the Philosophy and Theology of Intellectual Humility Research Project at St. Louis University (2015) and a Visiting Research Fellow of the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU (2015). His interests in philosophy include moral and political philosophy, epistemology and the philosophy of mind. Thomas's book, Republic of Equals: Predistribution and Property-owning Democracy was published by Oxford University Press (USA) in 2017. It is the first book-length study of so-called "pre distributive" egalitarian strategies. Previous publications include Value and Context: the Nature of Moral and Political Knowledge, (Oxford University Press 2006/paperback 2010), Bernard Williams (CUP, 2007) and Thomas Nagel (Routledge, 2008). Thomas was the PI during 2016–18 for the Templeton funded project 'The Moral Psychology of Inequality'. Thomas has refereed manuscripts and submissions for the leading publishers in academic philosophy and for a wide range of philosophy journals. In addition to research in philosophy Thomas has engaged in academic management as a head of department. He has worked as an REF consultant in the UK and has advised on senior academic appointments in the UK and the USA (the latter as a tenure reviewer) and for the Einstein Foundation (Berlin). In 2019 he was the holder of an Independent Social Research Foundation Fellowship studying the philosophical basis of the regulation of the financial sector. Thomas has also had an advisory role on research project applications in The Netherlands and the UK on the ethical regulation of AI from the role of robots in healthcare to autonomous systems in transportation and healthcare.
