Laurence Thomas

He has held appointments at Syracuse University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Notre Dame, University of Maryland, and Oberlin College, and in 1994 was a visiting scholar in the Religion Department at the University of Michigan. He was Andrew Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard University in 1978–79, received an NEH award to conduct a seminar on "Competing Rights Claims" in the summer of 1981, and was a Fellow of the National Humanities Center in 1982–83. He has given the Lawrence Kohlberg Lecture at the Association of Moral Education (1993) and the fifth Meyer Warren Tenenbaum and Labelle Tenenbaum Lecture at the University of South Carolina.

Thomas's teaching has been widely noted and praised, including feature in the Education Section of The New York Times in 1992. He was named Syracuse University's Scholar-Teacher of the Year in 1993. In July 1997, he presented the Kovler Lectures at the Medical School of the University of Cape Town, South Africa. These lectures will become part of his forthcoming book on moral objectivity and evil. He has been the Lincoln Lecturer (Fall 2002) at Arizona State University and in October 2000, he lectured before Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

Laurence Thomas (born 1949) is an American philosopher. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Political Science at Syracuse University. Thomas is noted for his work on moral luck, social philosophy and American Blacks and Jews.