Todd May
Todd Gifford May is a political philosopher who writes on topics of anarchism, poststructuralism, and post-structuralist anarchism. More recently he has published books on existentialism and moral philosophy.
Career
In 1989, May received a doctorate at Pennsylvania State University in continental philosophy. May has been teaching moral and political philosophy for over thirty years, beginning as a graduate instructor at Penn State before becoming a visiting assistant professor at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. May taught at Clemson from 1991 to 2022, where he served as the Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of Philosophy. Since 2022, he has been a lecturer in philosophy at Warren Wilson College. May also teaches philosophy to incarcerated people.Art academic Allan Antliff described May's 1994 The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism as "seminal," and he credited the book with introducing "post-structuralist anarchism," later abbreviated as "post-anarchism." May has published works on major poststructuralist philosophers, including Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. He also wrote books on more general topics accessible to the general reader, including Death, Our Practices, Our Selves, or, What It Means to Be Human, Friendship in an Age of Economics: Resisting the Forces of Neoliberalism, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe, A Fragile Life: Accepting Our Vulnerability.
May, along with Pamela Hieronymi, was a philosophical advisor to the NBC television show The Good Place. They both had cameos in the final episode.