Published Work

Wisdom for the Living: Sophia in Plato’s Republic, Journal of the History of Philosophy, forthcoming.

In proposing an account of wisdom (sophia) in Republic, Plato is intervening in a longstanding debate about the nature of the highest intellectual virtue for a human being and the authority and prestige that a legitimate claim to wisdom ought to confer to its possessors. Despite its historical and philosophical significance, wisdom has received limited scholarly attention. This paper offers an account of wisdom in Republic. I reject the prima facie attractive interpretation that in Republic, wisdom is identical to knowledge of Forms. Rather, wisdom of the city (or soul) is the ability to make good judgments, by the standard of the Forms, about how the whole city (soul) would best fare. I consider implications of this account for understanding Plato’s disagreement with the conception of wisdom that he attributes to Protagoras, the Two World's dispute about epistēmē, and Plato’s view of the limitations of human wisdom.

The Myth of Cronus in Plato’s Statesman: Cosmic Rotation and Earthly Correspondence (with Corinne Gartner). Apeiron 53.4: 437-462 (2017)​​.  [Link]

The cosmological myth in Plato’s Statesman has generated several longstanding scholarly disputes, among them a controversy concerning the number and nature of the cosmic rotation cycles that it depicts. According to the standard interpretation, there are two cycles of rotation: west-to-east rotation occurs during the age of Cronus, and east-to-west rotation occurs during the age of Zeus, which is also our present era. Recent readings have challenged this two-cycle interpretation, arguing that the period of rotation opposed to our own is governed neither by Cronus nor by Zeus, but is instead a separate rotational cycle during which chaos reigns before a divine ruler reestablishes control. We introduce a new constraint on any plausible interpretation of the myth. According to the Correspondence Principle, changes in fundamental cyclical processes that shape the way of life on earth (mode of generation, growth, aging, and mode of death) occur if and only if there is a change in the direction of cosmic rotation. We use the Correspondence Principle to defend a version of the standard two-cycle interpretation.

Works in Progress

Monograph: Wisdom in Plato’s Republic

The virtue, wisdom, is central to the political project and epistemology of the Republic and to its overall structure. For example, one of the guiding political aims of Republic is to explain what wisdom, the virtue of the political ruler, is and to argue that the best way of bringing about the ideal political constitution is to assign political power to those who are truly wise. Despite its importance, wisdom in the Republic has not received any sustained attention. The vast literature on the Republic’s political theory and epistemology offers no focused discussion of the topic, companions to the dialogue pay little attention to it, and even otherwise highly systematic treatments of wisdom in Ancient Greek philosophical thought, such as Cooper’s Pursuits of Wisdom, skip over wisdom in Plato. My monograph situates Plato’s contribution in a wider and longstanding dispute about wisdom, reconstructs the theory of wisdom in the Republic, locates it within the its broader epistemology and moral psychology of the dialogue, and draws out the implications of this theory for Platonic political philosophy. As I show, wisdom is a key concept for Plato: it is at least as central to his thinking as knowledge (epistēmē) and philosophy (philosophia). Once we read Republic with an eye to this theory of wisdom, key challenges to Plato’s epistemology and political theory are resolved, and the structure of the dialogue comes clearly into view.

Article: Using Forms as Models in Plato’s Republic (email for draft)

At the heart of the political project of the Republic is an extraordinary epistemic commitment: knowledge of the Forms enables one to make one's life and political community objectively better. From this commitment stems Plato’s revisionary proposal that full philosophical competency is a necessary component of political expertise, and the more drastic claim that, in the best political arrangement, only those who know the Forms would assume political power. Yet, for all of Plato’s confidence in the practical value of knowledge of Forms, he apparently says very little about how precisely one uses knowledge of Forms to make decisions about oneself and one’s political community. I argue that the key is to focus on Plato’s claim that Forms serve as models (παραδείγματα) for living and ruling. I show that Plato offers a rich and philosophically plausible account of models in Republic, which he brings to bear on his understanding of the philosopher rulers’ reasoning.

Article: Aristotle on the Unity of General Justice and Virtue (email for draft)

Aristotle opens his much-anticipated discussion of general justice with a focused discussion of whether general justice is the same as virtue. Competing answers to this question have been offered on Aristotle’s behalf, and different parts of EN V.1-2 appear to support alternative views. This paper offers an account of the relationship between general justice and virtue—and an explanation of Aristotle’s puzzling claim that justice and virtue are “the same but different in being”—by appealing to his distinction between general justice as a state (ἕξις) and general justice as an exercise (χρῆσις). General justice and virtue are the same state. However, justice as an exercise and virtue as an exercise stand in a part-whole relationship. This account resolves Broadie and Rowe’s charge that Aristotle has no coherent conception of the relationship between particular justice and character virtue. It also has implications concerning the way in which justice is always another’s good, why a just ruler is necessarily virtuous, and the cultivation of justice and virtue.

Article: Wisdom and Precision in Aristotle’s Ethics

Aristotle argues in NE 6.7 that wisdom is scientific knowledge (epistēmē) together with understanding (nous) of the most honorable things. Commentators disagree about the structure and strength of Aristotle’s argument. Some have accused Aristotle of equivocation, others of question-begging, and still others of rigging the premises of this argument. I defend Aristotle’s argument against these objections.

Article: Sextus on How to Use the Modes

In Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus offers the “modes of suspension of judgment,” which are three sets of argument schemes used to counter dogmatic arguments. These modes are the primary epistemic tools of the skeptical project. In this paper, I call attention to a set of arguments (the “Odd Arguments”) that appear in the discussion of the Ten Modes but do not pit phainomena (what appears) against one another. Rather, they oppose nooumena (what is thought) to nooumena. I argue that the Odd Arguments are not applications of the Ten Modes, but rather of Sextus’s second set of modes, the “Five Modes.” Properly understood, these passages illuminate the structure of the Five Modes and explain how the Ten Modes and Five Modes relate.