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490Ideas of Beauty, Ideals of CharacterIn Kelly Olson (ed.), A Cultural History of Beauty in Antiquity, . forthcoming.This chapter presents several of the dominant ideas and intellectual debates about human beauty from archaic Greece to early Christianity. At issue are ideals of character, ethical ideals of who one should be and how one should live. What constitutes beauty and why beauty matters change alongside conceptions of body and soul, virtue and happiness, and the relationship between human beings and the divine.
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225Did the Greeks Have a Concept of Recognition?In Thomas Kurana & Matthew Congdon (eds.), The Philosophy of Recognition, Routledge. 2010.
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1144The Guise of the Beautiful: Symposium 204d ffPhronesis 65 (2): 129-152. 2019.A crux of Plato’s Symposium is how beauty relates to the good. Diotima distinguishes beauty from the good, I show, to explain how erotic pursuits are characteristically ambivalent and opaque. Human beings pursue beauty without knowing why or thinking it good; yet they are rational, if aiming at happiness. Central to this reconstruction is a passage widely taken to show that beauty either coincides with the good or demands disinterested admiration. It shows rather that what one loves as beautiful…Read more
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778Plato and the dangerous pleasures of poikiliaClassical Quarterly 71 (1): 152-169. 2021.A significant strand of the ethical psychology, aesthetics and politics of Plato's Republic revolves around the concept of poikilia, ‘fascinating variety’. Plato uses the concept to caution against harmful appetitive pleasures purveyed by democracy and such artistic or cultural practices as mimetic poetry. His aim, this article shows, is to contest a prominent conceptual connection between poikilia and beauty (kallos, to kalon). Exploiting tensions in the archaic and classical Greek concept, Pla…Read more
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444Destrée, Pierre, and Penelope Murray, eds. A companion to ancient aesthetics. Hoboken, nj: Wiley‐blackwell, 2015, XIV + 538 pp., 26 b&w illus., $195.00 cloth (review)Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77 (2): 222-225. 2019.Review of the first comprehensive companion to the growing scholarship on ancient Greek and Roman aesthetics
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266Beauty Before the Eyes of OthersIn Fabian Dorsch & Dan-Eugen Ratiu (eds.), Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, University of Fribourg. pp. 164-176. 2016.This paper pursues the philosophical significance of a relatively unexplored point of Platonic aesthetics: the social dimension of beauty. The social dimension of beauty resides in its conceptual connection to shame and honour. This dimension of beauty is fundamental to the aesthetic education of the Republic, as becoming virtuous for Plato presupposes a desire to appear and to be admired as beautiful. The ethical significance of beauty, shame, and honour redound to an ethically rich notion of a…Read more
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2452Laughing to Learn: Irony in the Republic as PedagogyPolis 28 (2): 235-49. 2011.[Condensed abstract] Socrates' ironic use of 'makaria' (blessedness) in the Republic exhorts Glaucon to think more critically. Certain features of the supposedly ideal city, motivated by Glaucon's character, may be protreptic for Glaucon to practice philosophical courage and intellectual moderation.
Columbia University
PhD, 2018
Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
Aesthetics and Ethics |
History of Aesthetics |