The first stage of my professional career focused on Plato’s thought. In line with my historical background, my principal interest was understanding Plato on his own terms. My articles on Plato up to about 2008 represent attempts to achieve the objective. They focus on a wide range of Plato’s thought, his ethics, methodology, epistemology, metaphysics, and psychology, as well as on the problem of interpreting any aspect of Plato’s thought given the distinctive challenge and complication of the dialogic form of his writings. Trials of Reason: Plato and the Crafting of Philosophy (OUP 2008) culminated this vein of research. The book pursues two questions: What is Plato’s conception of philosophy? And how is the dialogue form employed in Plato’s presentation of this conception? In brief, I maintain that Plato conceives of philosophy as a kind of motivation, specifically a desire for wisdom, which he conceives as ethical knowledge. The book is then organized as a discussion of Plato’s conception of desire, ethical knowledge, the means of pursuing such knowledge, including the so-called elenctic and hypothetical methods, and the aporetic conclusions in which these pursuits inevitably end. In his early dialogues, Plato introduces philosophy (as he conceives it) and in doing so contrasts philosophy with what I call “counter-philosophical” approaches to life. This contrast serves to explain the dialogic character of Plato’s work. As I put it in the book: Plato’s dramatizations “are not wholly situated within the sphere of philosophical discourse. Rather, one of the basic functions of the texts is to craft philosophy. As the dialogues unfold, philosophical discourse emerges out of the various discourses of the polis. In the process, Plato works to establish why philosophical discourse must be the authoritative political discourse.” As such, I suggest, Plato’s dialogues are as much works of meta-philosophy as philosophy. In short, then, my deepest concern in this early work might be expressed in this way: I was interested in the idea that philosophy is a cultural-historical kind, and I wanted to examine one of its earliest and most important forms. I wanted to understand philosophy by examining one of the seminal ways in which it came into being. My approach to the topic was therefore inextricably historical and philosophical.

Since about 2007, at which time most of the research for and writing of Trials of Reason had been completed, I turned my principal attention to the subject of pleasure. My motivations were manifold, but primarily two. First, I wanted to shift focus from an author or figure or school to a topic or theme. Second, I found in the topic of pleasure a nexus of two growing interests, in ethics, especially metaethics, and in philosophy of mind or philosophical psychology. This work has now culminated in a book Pleasure in Ancient Philosophy (CUP, 2012), which examines pleasure in ancient philosophy from pre-Platonic figures through Plato, Aristotle, Epicureans, Cyrenaics, to the Old Stoics. The study also includes some Roman and late Antique authors who contribute to and discuss the work of these earlier schools and figures. The book examines two basic questions, which I call the identity and kinds questions: What is pleasure? And what kinds of pleasure are there? I hope to have made a strong case that the various ways these figures and schools answer these questions are dialogically continuous. For example, Aristotle’s formulations involve criticisms of Plato, and Epicurus develops Aristotelian contributions. In the penultimate chapter I discuss treatments of the identity and kinds questions in contemporary Anglophone philosophy, precisely from Ryle’s contributions in the late 40s and 50s up to the present. Then, in the final chapter, I discuss the relations between the ancient and contemporary treatments. One fundamental, remarkable conclusion of this comparison is that ancient treatments tend to focus on what I call the objects of pleasure, whereas contemporary treatments focus on the attitude toward such objects. I explain this distinction in view of the distinct contexts in which ancient and contemporary treatments of the identity and kinds questions have occurred, namely, within ethics and philosophy of mind respectively.

I am presently working in two areas: metaethics and philosophical psychology.

The work in philosophical psychology is a continuation of work I did in Pleasure in Ancient Philosophy. This work has historical and non-historical tracks. The historical track is taking the form of a collection of essays on ancient philosophical treatments of pleasure. The collection is pitched at a more specialized audience than Pleasure in Ancient Philosophy. Click here for the table of contents . The non-historical work concerns the identity of pleasure. I am particularly interested in the question of whether pleasure is a feeling or involves feeling and if so, what kind.

The work in metaethics concerns the nature of value. Again, I am pursuing questions historically and non-historically. Historically, I am studying various Greek conceptions or theories of the good, from the Pythagorean Table of Opposites to Sextus Empiricus' Against the Ethicists. To be clear, I am interested not in what the various figures and schools take to be good, but in what they take good, the good, or goodness to be. Additionally, I am interested in how they draw fundamental distinctions between kinds of goodness, for instance, between so-called conditional and unconditional goods. Non-historically, I am interested in the semantics of "good" and the nature of value. I am also interested in clarifying the distinctions between ethical value, moral value, and non-ethical, non-moral value. This work is being funded by an ACLS Fellowship for 2013-14 under the title Greek Eudaimonism and Modern Morality.