Thomas Pink completed undergraduate degrees in history and philosophy at Cambridge, and then worked there on rational choice theory for his PhD in philosophy. After working for four years at Kleinwort Benson as a merchant banker in London and the United States, he returned to academic life as a research fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge in 1990. He then lectured for three years at the University of Sheffield, coming to King’s College London in 1996. He ceased teaching in 2022 but remains active in research and publication, recently giving lectures and seminars in London, Oxford, Harvard, Berkeley and Notre Dame.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Philosophy of mind
• Ethics
• Political philosophy
• Rational choice theory
• Medieval and early modern philosophy

Thomas Pink works and publishes in ethics, philosophy of mind and action, free will, the metaphysics of power and causation, political and legal philosophy, and on the history of all these areas, especially from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. 

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). 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.

Professor Pink welcomes enquires from prospective students seeking to work with him on topics connected to his research interests.

For more details, please see his full research profile.

Selected Publications

Thomas is the author of:

• The Psychology of Freedom (Cambridge University Press 1996)
• Free Will: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2004)
• Self-Determination (Oxford University Press 2017) (the first of two volumes on The Ethics of Action)

Thomas is the editor of:

• Theories of the Will and Human Action: from Antiquity to the Present Day (Routledge 2004)
• Selections from the Political Works of Francisco Suarez (Liberty Fund 2015)

Teaching

Professor Pink has previously taught on the following modules
 
Undergraduate modules:

• 5AANA005 Ethics II: History of Ethical Philosophy