[3] 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.
[1][2] May taught at Clemson from 1991 to 2022, where he served as the Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of Philosophy.
[6] 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.”[7] May has published works on major poststructuralist philosophers, including Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault.
[8][9] He also wrote books on more general topics accessible to the general reader, including Death,[10] Our Practices, Our Selves, or, What It Means to Be Human,[11] Friendship in an Age of Economics: Resisting the Forces of Neoliberalism,[12] A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe,[13] A Fragile Life: Accepting Our Vulnerability.
[14] May, along with Pamela Hieronymi, was a philosophical advisor to the NBC television show The Good Place.