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John Thrasher

Associate Professor
John Thrasher

Bio

Dr. John Thrasher serves as research director at the Salmon P. Chase Center and is also a faculty member of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) Program at The Ohio State University.

His research and teaching focus on social contract theory, political economy, and the ethics of markets, as well as game theory, the evolution of social norms and conventions, and the history of political thought, especially David Hume and Adam Smith. His interdisciplinary research has appeared in philosophy journals such as Philosophy and Public Affairs and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Studies, Social Philosophy and Policy, and Synthese; political science journals such as the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Politics; and behavioral science journals such as Cognition, Nature Communications, Human Nature, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

He is the author, with Daniel Halliday, of The Ethics of Capitalism: An Introduction (Oxford, 2020) and, with Gerald Gaus, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics: An Introduction (Princeton, 2021), co-editor of New Approaches to Social Contract Theory (Oxford, 2024), and is completing a book, Contestable Democracy: How Conflict Sustains Political Legitimacy. 

He is a co-PI on the Templeton-funded project “PPE Experimental Lab” and founded and runs the PPE Summer Graduate Workshop. Before joining Ohio State, he was a Wang-Fradkin Professor at Chapman University and a tenured lecturer at Monash University.

He holds a PhD and an MA in Philosophy from the University of Arizona and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Colorado.

 

Areas of Expertise 

  • Capitalism and the ethics of markets
  • Social contract theory
  • Game theory and cooperation
  • Social norms and conventions
  • Adam Smith and David Hume
  • Liberalism and the open society
  • Democracy and political legitimacy