Professor Thomas Pink
Print version
Thomas Pink read history and philosophy at Cambridge, where he also received his PhD. After working for four years in London and New York for a City merchant bank, he returned to philosophy in 1990 as a Research Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He then lectured at Sheffield University prior to moving to King's in 1996.Pink’s main interests are in ethics, philosophy of mind and action, philosophy of law and in medieval and early modern philosophy.
He is currently writing on the free will problem - his Free Will: A Very Short Introduction is published by Oxford University Press in June 2004.
He is also working on the nature of moral normativity. Forthcoming on this topic, also from Oxford University Press, is his two volume The Ethics of Action. The first volume, Action and Self-Determination, deals with the nature of action and its possible ethical significance. This volume contains a new theory of freedom of action. The second volume, Action and Normativity, deals with various possible kinds of moral normativity, and examines whether moral normativity has anything to do with reason. At the heart of this second volume is a new theory of moral obligation and, based on that, a new theory of the rationality of moral motivation and action.
A general overview of the theory of obligation is to be found in Pink’s Royal Institute lecture of December 2002, ‘Moral obligation’ which is published in Modern Moral Philosophy ed. Anthony O’Hear (Cambridge University Press 2004).
The two past moral philosophers from whom Pink has learnt most are probably David Hume and Francisco Suarez. He has already written a number of papers on early modern ethics, especially on natural law theory, and forthcoming papers include discussions of Hobbes, Pufendorf and Locke.
He is an editor of London Studies in the History of Philosophy, and is also editing The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, containing the Hobbes-Bramhall controversy on free will, for the Clarendon Edition of the works of Hobbes.
Contact Details:
Telephone: 020 7848 2230
Email: tom.pink@kcl.ac.uk