•  130
    Meritocracy and the Tests of Virtue in Greek and Confucian Political Thought
    Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture 41. 2024.
    A crucial tenet of virtue-based or expertise-based theorizing about politics is that there are ways to identify and select morally and epistemically excellent people to hold office. This paper considers historical challenges to this task that come from within Greek and Confucian thought and political practice. Because of how difficult it is to assess character in ordinary settings, we argue that it is even more difficult to design institutions that select for virtue at the much wider political s…Read more
  •  3763
    Plato on Democracy
    In Eric Robinson & Valentina Arena (eds.), The Cambridge History of Democracy, Vol. 1: From Democratic Beginnings to c. 1350, Cambridge University Press. forthcoming.
    Plato is often acknowledged as the first philosophical critic of democracy and his Republic is regularly taken as a paradigm of an anti-democratic work. While it is true that Plato objected to much about the democracy of his own time, Plato’s political theorizing also reveals an interest in improving democratic institutions. This chapter explores three themes in Plato’s thinking about democracy: firstly, Plato's insistence that rulers should be knowledgeable and his claim that most people are po…Read more
  •  34
    Virtue and Action: Selected Papers (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2023.
    This volume brings together a selection of Rosalind Hursthouse’s essays on Aristotle, virtue ethics, and social philosophy. These articles—many of which are published in more obscure venues—provide valuable context and clarification for much of her more famous work on virtue ethics while drawing attention to new avenues of philosophical investigation Hursthouse pursued. Important contributions include articles on the development of virtue in children, what the Aristotelian practically wise perso…Read more
  •  1525
    Stoic Forgiveness
    In Glen Pettigrove & Robert Enright (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Pyschology of Forgiveness, Routledge. pp. 87-100. 2023.
    What can Stoicism offer to contemporary debates about forgiveness? Given their outright rejection of a reactive attitudes framework for responding to wrongdoing and their bold suggestions of how to revise our moral practices, the Stoics provide a valuable lens through which to re-evaluate various central claims in the debates about forgiveness. In this chapter, I highlight four common assumptions that the Stoics would consider problematic: firstly, that forgiveness is opposed to justice; secondl…Read more
  •  114
  •  198
    Unfamiliar Voices: Harmonizing the Non-Socratic Speeches and Plato's Psychology
    In Pierre Destrée & Zina Giannopolou (eds.), Plato's Symposium: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. 2017.
    Commentators have often been puzzled by the structure of the Symposium; in particular, it is unclear what the relationship is between Socrates’ speech and that of the other symposiasts. This chapter seeks to make a contribution to that debate by highlighting parallels between the first four speeches of the Symposium and the goals of the early education in the Republic. In both dialogues, I contend, we see Plato concerned with educating people through (a) activating and cultivating spirited motiv…Read more
  •  6891
    Plato on Love and Sex
    In Adrienne M. Martin (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy, Routledge Handbooks in Philoso. pp. 105-115. 2018.
    When people now talk about a relationship as being “Platonic”, they mean that the relationship is a non-sexual friendship. But what did Plato himself say about different kinds of relationship, and how did his name come to be associated with non-sexual relationships? While Plato’s Symposium has been the center of attention for his views on love, I argue that the Phaedrus and Laws VIII provide a much clearer account of Plato’s views. In these dialogues, Plato distinguishes between two kinds of lov…Read more
  •  301
    Changing the Laws of the Laws
    Ancient Philosophy 41 (2): 413-441. 2021.
    Did Plato intend the laws of the Laws to change? While most scholars agree that there is to be legal change in Magnesia, I contend that this issue has been clouded by confusing three distinct questions: (1) whether there are legal mechanisms for changing the law in Magnesia, (2) what the attitudes of Magnesian citizens towards innovation and legal change are, and (3) whether Plato thinks the law is always the ultimate political authority. Once we separate these issues and look at the relevant te…Read more
  •  128
  •  1070
    The Mixed Constitution in Plato’s Laws
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (1): 1-18. 2021.
    In Plato's Laws, the Athenian Visitor says that the best constitution is a mixture of monarchy and democracy. This is the theoretical basis for the institutions of Magnesia, and it helps the citizens to become virtuous. But what is meant by ‘monarchy’ and ‘democracy’, and how are they mixed? I argue that the fundamental relations in Plato's discussion of constitutions are those of authority and equality. These principles are centrally about the extent to which citizens submit to the judgment of …Read more
  •  146
    The Offices of Magnesia
    Polis 37 (3): 567-589. 2020.
    In this article, I attempt to provide a complete and exhaustive list of all of the offices and major political roles proposed within the constitution of Magnesia, detailing the title of the office, number of offices, method of appointment, age or gender restrictions, length of term, and explicit responsibilities assigned to that office. This tabulation is intended to be useful for new readers of the Laws and to scholars of various methodological approaches interested in the political arrangement…Read more
  •  108
    Review of Dominic J. O’Meara, "Cosmology and Politics in Plato’s Later Works" (review)
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 101 (2): 310-313. 2019.
  •  662
    Virtue, Rule-Following, and Absolute Prohibitions
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (1): 78-97. 2019.
    In her seminal article ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (1958) Elizabeth Anscombe argued that we need a new ethics, one that uses virtue terms to generate absolute prohibitions against certain act-types. Leading contemporary virtue ethicists have not taken up Anscombe's challenge in justifying absolute prohibitions and have generally downplayed the role of rule-following in their normative theories. That they have not done so is primarily because contemporary virtue ethicists have focused on what is su…Read more