I am Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, which I joined in 2018 as Head of its philosophy department. I earned my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1993, and previously taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the University of Utah. In 2024–25 I held the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities at the University of Guelph, and I am a member of the University of Tennessee's Foundational AI cluster. I work in the philosophy of science — physical, decisional, and human, including formal decision and game theory — and in the philosophy of practical reaso…
I am Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, which I joined in 2018 as Head of its philosophy department. I earned my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1993, and previously taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the University of Utah. In 2024–25 I held the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities at the University of Guelph, and I am a member of the University of Tennessee's Foundational AI cluster. I work in the philosophy of science — physical, decisional, and human, including formal decision and game theory — and in the philosophy of practical reason: action theory, phenomenology, and theories of freedom.
A single concern runs through my work: resisting reductionism, the urge to oversimplify by translating everything into one privileged scale or vocabulary. Its positive counterpart is the plurality of scales at which the universe is active — the theme of Without Hierarchy: The Scale Freedom of the Universe (Oxford, 2013). A Social Theory of Freedom (Routledge, 2016) carries the same instinct into human agency, offering an existential account of freedom that engages social science without reducing to it. My newest book, Reasoning in the Wild (Routledge, 2026, open access), turns it on reason itself: reasoning is not a private logical operation but a temporally organized activity distributed across persons, practices, institutions, media, and relations of trust — the public works of reason. The book is paired with the Protocol Collaboratory, a living, open companion where readers explore its protocols move by move, discuss them, and contribute their own: https://mthalos-m.github.io/RITW-online/.
My work has received the Royal Institute of Philosophy's inaugural Essay Prize (2012 and 2013) and the American Philosophical Association's Kavka Prize (1999), and I have held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Australian National University's Institute of Advanced Studies, the Tanner Humanities Center, the University of Sydney Center for Foundations of Science, and the Institute of Philosophy, University of London. Electronic copies of many of my publications and work in progress are on my Academia.edu page. I bring this work to bear on public policy where I can: with support from the National Science Foundation, I have studied precautionary decision-making in the face of catastrophic risk, especially in public settings, toward a prescriptive theory of precaution — how best to proceed amid known and unknown unknowns when a great deal is at stake — that does more than counsel aversion to risk.
