about

I am a philosopher serving as the inaugural Director for Cambridge House Christian Study Center at the College of William & Mary. I am also currently completing a three-year research project at St. Edmund’s College Cambridge and the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion.

My research spans Early Modern philosophy and contemporary philosophy of religion. Specifically, I am interested in personal identity, the significance of embodiment, and philosophical issues surrounding the afterlife. My first book is entitled The Metaphysics of Resurrection in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, and it was published in 2022 with Springer’s International Archive for the History of Ideas. I argued that the question of personal identity emerged from rich debates about the metaphysics of resurrection in the period, and I recovered models of bodily resurrection from figures like Francisco Suárez, the Cambridge Platonists, and Leibniz. Methodologically, I believe our own pressing questions are often reframed and best addressed by careful attention to philosophers in the tradition.

My current project, which is funded by the Templeton Religion Trust, focuses on the question of personal identity across death in analytic philosophy. I seek to provide rigorous treatments of the metaphysical and epistemic objections to the possibility of a personal afterlife. Intended future research projects include a monograph on the emergence of philosophical mechanism in the context of the intense theological debates of the 17th Century; a paper on the psychologising of moral habits (or ‘habitus‘) in the early Enlightenment; and a book-length treatment of the epistemology of religion in the 17th Century.

I first entered philosophy because of a vocation to education, and this vocation endures. I therefore make a commitment to teach widely in philosophy, and this drives much of what I end up researching. I have taught Early Modern philosophy at William & Mary, and at Cambridge I supervised papers in Early Modern Philosophy, Metaphysics, Moral Philosophy, Moral Theology, and Philosophy of Religion. My teaching at King’s College London covered the History of Philosophy, as well as Metaphysics and contemporary Philosophy of Mind.

email: jonwilliamthompson [at] gmail.com

academia.edu: https://cambridge.academia.edu/JonThompson