Amie L. Thomasson
Daniel P. Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy
Dartmouth College
Amie Thomasson works in the areas of metaphysics, philosophical methodology and metaontology, philosophy of art, philosophy of social and cultural objects, philosophy of mind and phenomenology. Her current work focuses on questions about what philosophy can legitimately do, and how we can do it.
She is the author of four books: Fiction and Metaphysics, Ordinary Objects, Ontology Made Easy, and Norms and Necessity.
Her new book, Rethinking Metaphysics, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in late 2024 or early 2025.
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A new volume of essays about Thomasson's work has recently appeared as Thomasson on Ontology in the series Philosophers In Depth (ed. Miguel Garcia-Godinez, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
The volume includes an introductory article by Thomasson, "How it all Hangs Together", discussing how the different parts of her work over the last three decades fit together to form part of a systematic approach.
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In addition to her books, she co-edited a book Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind with David Woodruff Smith, and has published more than 80 book chapters and articles on topics in metaphysics, metaontology, fiction, philosophy of mind and phenomenology, the philosophy of art, and social ontology.
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Honors and Awards
Ontology Made Easy was awarded the American Philosophical Association's 2017 Sanders Book Prize, "awarded to the best book in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, or epistemology that engages the analytic tradition published in English in the previous five-year period".
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Thomasson has held Fellowships with the National Endowment for the Humanities that helped support the writing of Ordinary Objects and Ontology Made Easy. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for academic year 2022-23, for work on a project entitled Rethinking Metaphysics. She is also the awardee of the 2022 Pufendorf Medal.
She delivered the 2017 Wedberg Lectures at the University of Stockholm in Sweden, the 2021 Whitehead Lectures at Harvard University, the 2022 Anna Tumarkin Lectures in Bern, Switzerland, and the 2022 Pufendorf Lectures in Lund, Sweden.
Employment
She is currently the Daniel P. Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Dartmouth College. Before coming to Dartmouth, she was Professor of Philosophy and Cooper Fellow at the University of Miami, and she has also held positions at The University of Hong Kong and Texas Tech University.
Visiting Appointments
In July-August 2018 she was the Anderson Distinguished Fellow at the University of Sydney in Australia. She has also been a visitor at the Australian National University and at Durham University (U.K.).
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Media:
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Full recordings of the Pufendorf Lectures from Lund University, Sweden, in June 2022, are viewable here.
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Podcast "Amie Thomasson on her Philosophical Journey" on Om filosofers liv och tankar (On Philosophers' Lives and Thoughts), from June 2022.
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An interview and discussion of Thomasson's work on Swedish Radio P1 with Asa Burman and Robin Stenwall is here (mostly in Swedish) https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/utblick-amie-thomasson-till-filosofins-forsvar
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"Conceptual Engineering: When do we need it? How can we do it?", talk from the NYU Foundations of Conceptual Engineering Workshop, from September 2018.
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A debate from the Institute of Art and Ideas on "The New Enlightenment", with Julian Baggini and Hilary Lawson, can be found here.
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A debate from the Institute of Art and Ideas on 'Why is there something rather than nothing', with George Ellis and Rupert Sheldrake, can be found here.
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An extended interview about Easy Ontology, conducted by William Nava on "Who Shaves the Barber" is here.
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A short interview conducted by the Royal Institute for Philosophy may be found here.
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A video of her Royal Institute for Philosophy Lecture, "Easy Ontology and the Work of Metaphysics" may be found here.
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In January 2017 she did an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit, which can be found here.
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Click here for a podcast of her interview about social ontology on Australia's Radio 3CR "Radical Philosophy" program
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An interview about her work can be found in 3AM Magazine.
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Ontology made Easy was recently reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement.
