John Thrasher is Visiting Associate Professor at Ohio State's Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, and a core faculty member of the PPE program for the 2025-2026 academic year.  He is the Wang-Fradkin Associate Professor in Philosophy and the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University in Orange County, California, where he also directs the Law & Liberal Arts Minor. 

Thrasher specializes in political philosophy, normative ethics, and decision/game theory and its applications to ethics and political philosophy. He is the co-author (with the late Jerry Gaus) of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics: An Introduction  (Princeton University Press, 2021), the leading textbook in the field of PPE. With Dan Halliday, he co-authored The Ethics of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2020), and with Michael Moehler he co-edited New Approaches to Social Contract Theory: Liberty, Equality, Diversity, and the Open Society (Oxford University Press, 2024). 

Currently, he is working on a book that develops and defends the idea of the dynamic society as a competitor to traditional theories of liberalism and its solidaristic alternatives (e.g., populism, nationalism, communitarianism). This book draws on some of his recent work on the open society, which can be found here.