Alan Thomas (philosopher)

Alan Thomas (born 1964) is a British philosopher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of York. He is best known for his works on ethics and political philosophy.

Alan Thomas
Born	1964 (age 60–61) Shrewsbury, UK
Spouse	Kathryn Brown
Awards	Kennedy Scholar 1987–88
Education
Education	King's College, Cambridge (1984–1987) University of Oxford (D.Phil.)
Thesis	A contextual model of moral justification (1995)
Doctoral advisor	Bernard Williams
Philosophical work
Era	21st-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
Institutions	King’s College, London (1993-1998) University of Kent Tilburg University (2010-2016) University of York (2016-)
Main interests	moral philosophy, political philosophy
Website	https://ethics-socialphilosophy.com/ https://alanthomas.academia.edu https://uk.linkedin.com/in/alan-thomas-51110a76

Career

Thomas was educated at the Graig Comprehensive School, Llanelli, before undergraduate study at King's College, Cambridge. Following a year at Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar, Thomas returned to Oxford University to complete his doctorate under the supervision of Bernard Williams. Thomas began his career at King's College, London before taking up a lectureship at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Thomas became a professor of ethics at Tilburg University in 2010 before becoming a professor of philosophy at the University of York in 2016. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia (2007–2008), a fellow of the Murphy Institute at Tulane University (2009–10), a visiting fellow of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University (2015) and a visiting professor at St. Louis University (2015). His research has been funded by the AHRC (2001) and the Templeton Foundation (2015, 2016–18). In 2019 Thomas was funded by the UK's Independent Social Research Foundation for work on the regulation of the financial sector. He is currently part of a multi-department (Philosophy, Computing, Law) and multi-university research team working on the UKRI (EPSRC) funded project on the resilience of autonomous systems.^[1][2][3][4]

Concepts

Thomas extended William Reddy’s concept of an “emotion regime” to the context of contemporary market institutions. Along with his co-authors in the book Extravagance and Misery: The Emotional Regime of Market Societies, they argue that market orders generate characteristic patterns of feeling, including aspiration, anxiety, insecurity, guilt, and resentment.^[5] These affective patterns are presented not as individual psychological accidents but as structural effects of market institutions, which cultivate and reinforce norms of competitive desire, consumerist aspiration, and social comparison.^[5]

The authors treat market societies as emotional regimes in Reddy’s sense: normative-affective orders that prescribe, reward, and stabilize certain feelings while generating forms of emotional suffering.^[5] Their analysis positions the emotional consequences of markets—such as cycles of extravagance and misery—as subjects for ethical and political evaluation within contemporary political philosophy.^[5]

Books

• Extravagance and Misery: the Emotional Regime of Market Societies, co-authored with Alfred Archer and Bart Engelen, Oxford University Press, 2024 November.
• Bernard Williams, Cambridge 'Elements' Series, Cambridge University Press, 2024.
• Republic of Equals: Predistribution and Property-Owning Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2017
• Thomas Nagel, Routledge, 2015
• Bernard Williams (editor and contributor), Cambridge University Press, 2007
• Value and Context: the Nature of Moral and Political Knowledge, The Clarendon Press, 2006