Mariam Thalos
I am a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. After earning my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1993, I taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, before joining the faculty of the University of Utah Department of Philosophy in 2001. My research focuses on foundational questions in the sciences, especially the physical, social and decisional sciences, as well as on the relations amongst the sciences. And I apply as much of this as I can to issues of public policy. I am currently being funded by the NSF to study precautionary decision making in relation to catastrophic risk, especially in public contexts. The goal is a prescriptive theory of precaution that does more than simply endorse aversion to risk.
I’ve authored numerous articles on causation, explanation and how relations between micro and macro are handled by a range of scientific theories; as well as articles in political philosophy, action theory, metaphysics, epistemology, logical paradox and feminism. I’m a former fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Australian National University, the Tanner Humanities Center, the University of Sydney Center for Foundations of Science, and the London Institute of Philosophy. At the present time I’m working on two book projects: "The Natural History of the Will" and “Without Hierarchy: The Unity of Science in a Nonreductive Framework.” I hope one day to have time to devote to a book for a wider audience with the tentative title “Philosophy is of Familiar Things: Philosophical Thought in Lay Contexts.”
