University of Pittsburgh
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1993
New York City, New York, United States of America
  •  9
    Book Reviews (review)
    with Stephen Vaughn, John Dunn, Thomas William Heyck, Elliott Levine, Pauline Croft, Michael Hangan, Gordon C. F. Bearn, Helen Pringle, Barbara S. Krasner, G. M. Ditchfield, Laurence Brockliss, Linda Munk, Kenneth Fincham, G. Royden Hunt, James R. Watson, Brian Holden Reid, Christoph Hollender, Stephen Darwall, John Peacock, Raphael Obermann, Perry R. Wilson, Geoffrey Koziol, H. Zmora, Paul Capezzuto, Eugenia Paulicelli, Fredric S. Zuckerman, Joseph Rykwert, David J. Denby, Marvin B. Becker, Ann Blair, Philip Thody, Patrick Bishop, Thomas Anderson, Harold Stone, R. A. Houlbrooke, John Freeman, Anthony Pym, Noel Gray, Richard Sheldon, Gary K. Browning, Tetsuzo Nakano, M. Weyemburgh, Frederick M. Schweitzer, Robert Zuzowski, Katharine D. Kennedy, George V. Strong, Anthony Zielonka, David Allan, Svend Erik Larsen, and Jean‐Philippe Mathy
    The European Legacy 1 (7): 2119-2178. 1996.
  •  3
    European and American Philosophers
    with John Marenbon, Douglas Kellner, Richard D. Parry, Gregory Schufreider, Ralph McInerny, Andrea Nye, R. M. Dancy, Vernon J. Bourke, A. A. Long, James F. Harris, Thomas Oberdan, Paul S. MacDonald, Véronique M. Fóti, F. Rosen, James Dye, Pete A. Y. Gunter, Lisa J. Downing, W. J. Mander, Peter Simons, Maurice Friedman, Robert C. Solomon, Nigel Love, Mary Pickering, Andrew Reck, Simon J. Evnine, John C. Coker, Georges Dicker, James Gouinlock, Paul J. Welty, Gianluigi Oliveri, Jack Zupko, Tom Rockmore, Wayne M. Martin, Ladelle McWhorter, Hans-Johann Glock, Georgia Warnke, John Haldane, Joseph S. Ullian, Steven Rieber, David Ingram, Nick Fotion, George Rainbolt, Thomas Sheehan, Gerald J. Massey, Barbara D. Massey, David E. Cooper, David Gauthier, James M. Humber, J. N. Mohanty, Michael H. Dearmey, Oswald O. Schrag, Ralf Meerbote, George J. Stack, John P. Burgess, Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Nicholas Jolley, Adriaan T. Peperzak, E. J. Lowe, William D. Richardson, Stephen Mulhall, and C.
    In Robert L. Arrington (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophers, Blackwell. 2017.
    Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categ…Read more
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  •  24
    Conditional Irony in the Socratic Dialogues
    Philosophical Inquiry 43 (1): 98-118. 2019.
  •  1
  •  36
    Socratic Principles, Socratic Knowledge
    Philosophical Inquiry 21 (3-4): 43-60. 1999.
  •  17
    Moral Motivation: A History (edited book)
    Oxford University Press USA. 2016.
    Moral Motivation presents a history of the concept of moral motivation. The book consists of ten chapters by eminent scholars in the history of philosophy, covering Plato, Aristotle, later Peripatetic philosophy, medieval philosophy, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, Fichte and Hegel, and the consequentialist tradition. In addition, four interdisciplinary "Reflections" discuss how the topic of moral motivation arises in epic poetry, Cicero, early opera, and Theodore Dreiser. Most contemporary philosop…Read more
  •  40
    Aristotle on Perception
    Philosophical Review 108 (2): 282. 1999.
    This is an important book for the specialist in Aristotelian natural science and philosophy of mind. While its overall aims are more sweeping—to show how the account of perception is an application of the explanatory method of the Physics and to argue that Aristotle’s resulting method of explaining mental activity has substantive advantages over contemporary accounts in philosophy of mind —much of its most successful argument is a sustained and detailed attack on a position made famous by Myles …Read more
  •  2
    Socrates’ reverse irony
    Classical Quarterly 52 (1): 220-230. 2002.
  • Misperceptions of Aristotle: His Alleged Responses to the Skeptic
    Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1993.
    I argue that many standard interpretations of Aristotle suffer from what Cora Diamond calls "the metaphysical spirit". The metaphysical spirit lays down requirements for a given subject in advance of actual investigation; it already knows how ethics, say, or epistemology, must be conducted and what problems must be addressed. Standard readings of Aristotle focus on certain assumptions based not so much on Aristotle's texts as on "metaphysical" assumptions about the nature of the philosophical pr…Read more
  •  51
    Conditional irony in the Socratic dialogues
    Classical Quarterly 49 (02): 456-. 1999.
    Socratic irony is potentially fertile ground for exegetical abuse. It can seem to offer an interpreter the chance to dismiss any claim which conflicts with his account of Socratic Philosophy merely by crying ‘irony’. If abused in this way, Socratic irony can quickly become a convenient receptacle for everything inimical to an interpretation. Much recent scholarship rightly reacts against this and devotes itself to explaining how Socrates actually means everything he says, at least everything of …Read more
  •  39
    Reality, What Matters and The Matrix
    In Christopher Grau (ed.), Philosophers Explore the Matrix, Oxford University Press. pp. 98--114. 2005.
  •  37
    Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (review)
    Philosophical Review 113 (2): 269-271. 2004.
    The middle chapter, “Reading Epictetus,” consists of two discourses translated in full, with a demonstration of how Epictetus employs the stylistic techniques described earlier. The body of the book divides into two sets of chapters, 1–4 and 6–9. The first set treats Epictetus’s life, his intellectual and cultural context, and the transmission, structure, style, and overall content of his work. Epictetus, like Socrates, wrote nothing. His student Arrian composed a lengthy treatise entitled Disco…Read more
  •  145
    The Role of Good Upbringing in Aristotle’s Ethics
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (4): 771-797. 1996.
    It is argued that a proper appreciation of the passages in the Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle requires the student of ethics to be well brought up implies that the Ethics is not attempting to justify the objective correctness of its substantive conception of happiness to someone who does not already appreciate its distinctive value. Reflection on the import of the good-upbringing restriction can lead us to see that Aristotle's conception of ethical objectivity is not only radically different…Read more
  •  2
    Perception, Knowledge, and the Sceptic in Aristotle
    Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 14 83-131. 1996.
  •  25
    Conditional irony in the Socratic dialogues
    Classical Quarterly 49 (2): 456-472. 1999.
    Socratic irony is potentially fertile ground for exegetical abuse. It can seem to offer an interpreter the chance to dismiss any claim which conflicts with his account of Socratic Philosophy merely by crying ‘irony’. If abused in this way, Socratic irony can quickly become a convenient receptacle for everything inimical to an interpretation. Much recent scholarship rightly reacts against this and devotes itself to explaining how Socrates actually means everything he says, at least everything of …Read more
  •  2
    Socratic irony
    In John Bussanich & Nicholas D. Smith (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates, Continuum. 2013.
  •  33
    Happy Lives and the Highest Good (review)
    Journal of Philosophy 104 (5): 263-268. 2007.
  •  108
    Aiming at Virtue in Plato
    Cambridge University Press. 2008.
    This study of Plato's ethics focuses on the concept of virtue. Based on detailed readings of the most prominent Platonic dialogues on virtue, it argues that there is a central yet previously unnoticed conceptual distinction in Plato between the idea of virtue as the supreme aim of one's actions and the determination of which action-tokens or -types are virtuous. Appreciating the 'aiming/determining distinction' provides detailed and mutually consistent readings of the most well-known Platonic di…Read more
  •  107
    Virtue and argument in Aristotle's ethics
    Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 94 (1): 37-78. 2007.
  •  42
    Platonic Virtue: An Alternative Approach
    Philosophy Compass 9 (9): 605-614. 2014.
    I begin by describing certain central features of a prominent Anglophone approach to Platonic virtue over the last few decades. I then present an alternative way of thinking about virtue in Plato that shifts central concern away from moral psychology and questions about virtue's relationship to happiness. The approach I defend focuses on virtue, both as a supreme aim of a person's actions and as something whose nature needs to be determined
  •  19
    Colloquium 5: Theoretical Nous And Its Objects In Aristotle
    Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 28 (1): 161-180. 2013.
    This paper argues for a novel reading of the nature of theoretical nous and its objects, focusing on Aristotle's account in De Anima III.4. It is argued that theoretical nous is not best conceived in this context as a faculty, but as understanding. Moreover the nature of that understanding varies depending on its object's relationship to matter.