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84Dumb beasts and dead philosophers: humanity and the humane in ancient philosophy and literatureOxford University Press. 2007.The book is about three things. First, how Ancient thinkers perceived humans as like or unlike other animals; second about the justification for taking a humane attitude towards natural things; and third about how moral claims count as true, and how they can be discovered or acquired. Was Aristotle was right to see continuity in the psychological functions of animal and human souls? The question cannot be settled without taking a moral stance. As we can either focus on continuity or on discontin…Read more
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2On Aristotle's Physics 1.4-6Duckworth. 2009.Aristotle's Physics 1.4-9 explores a range of questions about the basic structure of reality, the nature of prime matter, the principles of change, the relation between form and matter, and the issue of whether things can come into being out of nothing, and if so, in what sense that is true. Philoponus' commentaries do not merely report and explain Aristotle and the other thinkers whom Aristotle is discussing. They are also the philosophical work of an independent thinker in the Neoplatonic trad…Read more
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3André Laks, Le vide et la haine: éléments pour une histoire archaïque de la négativité; Introduction à la “philosophie présocratique” (review)Rhizai. A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science 339-344. 2008.Review of André Laks, Le vide et la haine: éléments pour une histoire archaïque de la négativité, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2004 ; Introduction à la “philosophie présocratique”, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2006
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14The Greek Cosmologists. Volume I: The Formation of the Atomic Theory and Its Earliest Critics. David Furley (review)Isis 79 (3): 536-537. 1988.
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42Scott Austin: Parmenides, Being, Bounds and Logic (review)Ancient Philosophy 11 (2): 393-396. 1991.This is a book review of the work by Scott Austin.
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27George Klosko, "The Development of Plato's Political Theory" (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 27 (1): 146. 1989.
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49Love, Sex and the Gods: Why things have divine names in Empedocles’ poem, and why they come in pairsRhizomata 4 (1): 80-110. 2016.
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42"No" means "Yes": The Seduction of the Word in Plato's PhaedrusProceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 15 (1): 263-281. 1999.The motifs of love and seduction in the Phaedrus are not about sexual love but about philosophy, and particularly about two different approaches to philosophy, one engaged and emotionally, even poetically, involved and one cold, rational and detached. Socrates' palinode speech in the Phaedrus contrasts the lover of beauty whose philosophical sensitivities enable the wings to grow and intellectual vision to occur, with the cool rational character of the non-lover who has no place for love of beau…Read more
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44“If all things were to turn to smoke, it’d be the nostrils would tell them apart”In Enrique Hülsz Piccone (ed.), Nuevos Ensayos Sobre Heráclito: Actas Del Segundo Symposium Heracliteum, . 2009.I start by asking what Aristotle knew (or thought) about Heraclitus: what were the key features of Heraclitus's philosophy as far as Aristotle was concerned? In this section of the paper I suggest that there are some patterns to Aristotle's references to Heraclitus: besides the classic doctrines (flux, ekpyrosis and the unity of opposites) on the one hand, and the opening of Heraclitus's book on the other, Aristotle knows and reports a few slightly less obvious sayings, one of which is in my tit…Read more
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19Sources of Significance in Hippolytus's Account of Greek PhilosophyApeiron 27 (3). 1994.L'A. étudie l'oeuvre d'Hippolyte de Rome qui présente, moins qu'un véritable intérêt philosophique, l'avantage d'une certaine connaissance de l'histoire de la philosophie, sur laquelle il fonde sa défense de la doctrine chrétienne. Le débat s'articule autour de l'originalité de l'interprétation de la philosophie grecque, des Présocratiques en particulier, par Hippolyte. Il s'agit, par comparaison avec Plotin, de délimiter les sources philosophiques de son oeuvre empreinte d'un moyen platonisme t…Read more
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79Perceiving white and sweet (again) : Aristotle, De Anima 3.7, 431a20-b1Classical Quarterly 48 (2): 433-446. 1998.In chapter 7 of the third book of De anima Aristotle is concerned with the activity of the intellect, which, here as elsewhere in the work, he explores by developing parallels with his account of sense-perception. In this chapter his principal interest appears to be the notion of judgement, and in particular intellectual judgements about the value of some item on a scale of good and bad. In this paper I shall argue, firstly that there is in fact a coherent structure and focus to this chapter, wh…Read more
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2Plato, Wittgenstein and the definition of gamesIn Luigi Perissinotto & Begoña Ramón Cámara (eds.), Wittgenstein and Plato: connections, comparisons and contrasts, Palgrave. pp. 196-219. 2013.In this paper I argue, controversially, that Plato's Meno anticipates Wittgenstein's critique of essentialism. Plato is usually read as an essentialist of the very kind that Wittgenstein was challenging, and the Meno in particular is usually taken as evidence that Plato thought that to know something you must be able to define it, and that if you can't define it you can't investigate any other questions on the topic. I suggest instead that Plato shows Socrates proposing such a position (much as …Read more
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University of East AngliaSchool of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication StudiesRetired faculty
Norwich, Norfolk, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
Plato |
Areas of Interest
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