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7What did the early Greek philosophers think about animals and their lives? How did they view plants? And, ultimately, what type of relationship did they envisage between all sorts of living beings? On these topics there is evidence of a prolonged investigation by several Presocratics. However, scholarship has paid little attention to these issues and to the surprisingly "modern" development they received in Presocratics' doctrines. This book fills this lacuna through a detailed (and largely unpr…Read more
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118General Introduction on the Present Time in “Now, Exaiphnês, and the Present Moment”History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 26 (2): 177-180. 2024.
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152VI—Paradoxes as Philosophical Method and Their Zenonian OriginsProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 121 (2): 153-181. 2021.In this paper I show that one of the most fruitful ways of employing paradoxes has been as a philosophical method that forces us to reconsider basic assumptions. After a brief discussion of recent understandings of the notion of paradoxes, I show that Zeno of Elea was the inventor of paradoxes in this sense, against the background of Heraclitus’ and Parmenides’ way of argumentation: in contrast to Heraclitus, Zeno’s paradoxes do not ask us to embrace a paradoxical reality; and in contrast to Par…Read more
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248What about Plurality? Aristotle’s Discussion of Zeno’s ParadoxesPeitho 12 (1): 85-106. 2021.While Aristotle provides the crucial testimonies for the paradoxes of motion, topos, and the falling millet seed, surprisingly he shows almost no interest in the paradoxes of plurality. For Plato, by contrast, the plurality paradoxes seem to be the central paradoxes of Zeno and Simplicius is our primary source for those. This paper investigates why the plurality paradoxes are not examined by Aristotle and argues that a close look at the context in which Aristotle discusses Zeno holds the answer …Read more
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Space in ancient times: from the beginning to AristotleIn Andrew Janiak (ed.), Space: a history, Oxford University Press. 2020.
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27Ancient Ethics and the Natural World (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2021.This book explores a distinctive feature of ancient philosophy: the close relation between ancient ethics and the study of the natural world. Human beings are in some sense part of the natural world, and they live their lives within a larger cosmos, but their actions are governed by norms whose relation to the natural world is up for debate. The essays in this volume, written by leading specialists in ancient philosophy, discuss how these facts about our relation to the world bear both upon anci…Read more
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51The Concept of Motion in Ancient Greek Thought: Foundations in Logic, Method, and MathematicsCambridge University Press. 2020.This book examines the birth of the scientific understanding of motion. It investigates which logical tools and methodological principles had to be in place to give a consistent account of motion, and which mathematical notions were introduced to gain control over conceptual problems of motion. It shows how the idea of motion raised two fundamental problems in the 5th and 4th century BCE: bringing together being and non-being, and bringing together time and space. The first problem leads to the …Read more
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85The Labours of Zeno – a Supertask indeed?Ancient Philosophy Today 1 (1): 1-17. 2019.It is usually supposed that, with his dichotomy paradox, Zeno gave birth to the modern so-called supertask debate – the debate of whether carrying out an infinite sequence of actions or operations...
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58Whatever our metaphysics of time, today we usually work with the assumption that we have one unified temporal framework, which allows for situating all events, processes, and happenings in the sense that we can put them all in a temporal relation to each other; they are all either before, after, or simultaneous with each other. In this paper, I show that for the early Greeks, by contrast, the very idea of such a unified notion of time would be foreign; instead, they assume different temporal (an…Read more
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75The Notion of Continuity in ParmenidesPhilosophical Inquiry 43 (1): 40-53. 2019.In this paper, I want to show that continuity is of crucial philosophical significance in Parmenides, who is the first thinker in the West to use the notion of continuity in a philosophically interesting and systematic way, and what being continuous (suneches) means for him. I look in some detail at the three passages in fragment 8 of Parmenides’ poem that are central for Parmenides’ notion of being suneches and discuss whether being suneches refers to something being temporally uninterrupted, s…Read more
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32Aristotle's Measuring DilemmaOxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 52 257-301. 2017.This paper has two main goals: first, it reconstructs Aristotle’s account of measurement in his Metaphysics and shows how it connects to modern notions of measurement. Second, it demonstrates that Aristotle’s notion of measurement only works for simple measures, but leads him into a dilemma once it comes to measuring complex phenomena, like mo-tion, where two or more different aspects, such as time and space, have to be taken into account. This is shown with the help of Aristotle’s reaction to o…Read more
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381Contingency and NecessityThe Monist 97 (1): 86-103. 2014.This paper argues that the problem of how to act in the face of radical contingency is of central importance in Musil’s novel and intimately connected to what Musil calls the sense of possibility. There is a variety of different strategies by which individuals, and the state of Kakania as a whole, deal with contingency, and they all involve a claim to a kind of grounding or necessity; for example, the Parallel Campaign is one big attempt to ground Kakania in what can be perceived as a form of me…Read more
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86Review of Christopher Shields, Aristotle (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (7). 2008.
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419A time for learning and for counting – Egyptians, Greeks and empirical processes in Plato’s TimaeusIn Richard D. Mohr & Barbara M. Sattler (eds.), One Book, the Whole Universe: Plato's Timaeus Today, Parmenides. pp. 249-266. 2010.This paper argues that processes in the sensible realm can be in accord with reason in the Timaeus, since rationality is understood here as being based on regularity, which is conferred onto processes by time. Plato uses two different temporal structures in the Timaeus, associated with the contrast there drawn between Greek and Egyptian approaches to history. The linear order of before and after marks natural processes as rational and underlies the Greek treatment of history. By contrast, a bidi…Read more
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47Colloquium 2: Parmenides’ System: The Logical Origins of his MonismProceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 26 (1): 25-90. 2011.The paper demonstrates that Parmenides’ monism is a logical consequence of his criteria for philosophy, in conjunction with the logical operators he uses, and their holistic connection. Parmenides, I argue, is the first philosopher to set out explicit criteria for philosophy, establishing as criterion not only consistency, but also what I call rational admissibility, the requirement when giving an account of something that the account be based on rational analysis and can withstand rational scru…Read more
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114Time is Double the Trouble: Zeno’s Moving RowsAncient Philosophy 35 (1): 1-22. 2015.Zeno’s Moving Rows paradox is the only paradox among his four paradoxes of motion that is usually skipped over as being of no philosophical interest. This paper aims to give a new diagnosis of the Moving Rows paradox, a diagnosis that allows us to see it as raising a philosophically interesting problem concerning the relationship of time, space, and motion. It shows the consequences of confusing time’s dependence on the space covered in a motion with time’s dependence on the motion performed. I …Read more
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2The Eleusinian Mysteries in Pre-platonic Thought. Metaphor, Practise and Imagery for Plato’s SymposiumIn Vishwa Adluri (ed.), Greek Religion, Philosophy and Salvation, De Gruyter. pp. 151-190. 2013.This is part of a two-paper project to show in detail in ways that have not been attempted before that, in the Symposium, Plato uses the language and metaphors of the Eleusinian Mysteries as a template for the ascent to the Form of Beauty; and also to explain why he might have chosen to do so. The standard accounts of the Eleusinian Mysteries come from sources that have themselves been influenced by Plato and hence are unsuitable to demonstrating the extent of his exploitation of the Mysteries. …Read more
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40Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy. Edited by Patricia Curd and Daniel Graham (review)Ancient Philosophy 33 (1): 187-193. 2013.
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27One Book, the Whole Universe: Plato's Timaeus Today (edited book)Parmenides. 2010.A collection of essays from major scholars in the field as well as from people in a wide range of other disciplines to which the Timaeus and its reception have been of relevance, from architecture and film studies to physics.
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25Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy by John PalmerClassical World: A Quarterly Journal on Antiquity 107 (3): 421-423. 2014.Publisher PDF.
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718A Likely Account of Necessity: Plato’s Receptacle as a Physical and Metaphysical Foundation for SpaceJournal of the History of Philosophy 50 (2): 159-195. 2012.This paper aims to show that—and how—Plato’s notion of the receptacle in the Timaeus provides the conditions for developing a mathematical as well as a physical space without itself being space. In response to the debate whether Plato’s receptacle is a conception of space or of matter, I suggest employing criteria from topology and the theory of metric spaces as the most basic ones available. I show that the receptacle fulfils its main task–allowing the elements qua images of the Forms to exist …Read more
University Of Berlin
Department Of Philosophy
Alumnus
St Andrews, FIfe, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
History of Western Philosophy |
Metaphysics |
Space and Time |
Aesthetics |