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On the back jacket of the 1992 Yale University Press edition of Nishida Kitarō’s An Inquiry into the Good (trans.…
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Professor Thomas, who was emeritus at Syracuse University where he spent most of his career, wrote widely in moral and political philosophy, with a particular focus on moral psychology. There is an obituary here and you can read more about his work here. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Thomas or those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.
(Thanks to David Gordon for the pointer.)
This is such very sad news. I knew Laurence from his time at Pitt where we were both students of Kurt Baier. I helped attract him to UNC, spent time before that with him and Jerry Postema at a legendary six-week long Council for Philosophical Studies Institute on Law and Ethics at Williams College in the middle 1970s. It featured Bernard Williams, Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, and others as faculty.
Laurence and I saw each other often over the years, but not since 2017. As David Benatar says in his obituary, Laurence was all about passion. Rest well, my friend.
Laurence Thomas’s The Family and the Political Self exemplifies a rare moral intelligence. The book sharpens judgment without polemic, and steadies the nerves without complacency. Its origins lie in Thomas’s 1997 Kovler Lectures at the University of Cape Town and in his later work as a visiting professor in South Africa, where he witnessed the collapse of apartheid and the difficult emergence of goodwill. That experience deepened his lifelong commitment to moral clarity. The book remains a testament to a philosopher who faced evil without illusion.
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