Rate My Professor Iain Thomson

Iain Thomson is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Honors Advisor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. He earned a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1991, an M.A. from the University of California, San Diego in 1994, completed graduate work at the University of California, Irvine in 1994, and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 1999. Thomson's research interests center on 19th and 20th century Continental philosophy, with a particular emphasis on Martin Heidegger. He regularly teaches Introduction to Philosophy, Existentialism, Modern Political Philosophy, and various courses on contemporary Continental philosophy focusing on figures such as Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, or on issues like the philosophical significance of death, technology, and nihilism.

Thomson is the author of several monographs published by Cambridge University Press: Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (2005), Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (2011), Rethinking Death in and after Heidegger (2024), and Heidegger on Technology’s Danger and Promise in the Age of AI (2025). He co-edited The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945–2015 (2019), comprising 53 chapters and 888 pages. His contributions to edited volumes include 'Heidegger and National Socialism' in A Companion to Heidegger (2005), 'Death and Demise in Being and Time' in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time (2013), and 'Heidegger’s Nazism in the Light of his early Black Notebooks' in Heidegger Jahrbuch 11 (2017). Thomson's articles have appeared in journals such as Inquiry, Journal of the History of Philosophy, The Harvard Review of Philosophy, and International Journal of Philosophical Studies. He received the National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship (2007-2008) and the Gunter Starkey Award for Teaching Excellence (2002-2003).