University College London
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2017
St Andrews, FIfe, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy
  •  16
    How do we learn to be good? Aristotle’s answer will be familiar to any student of Greek philosophy: we become good—or virtuous—by doing virtuous actions. But ho.
  •  9
    Ancient Greek thought saw the birth, in so-called Western philosophy, of the study now known as moral psychology. In its broadest sense, moral psychology encompasses the study of those aspects of human psychology relevant to our moral lives—desire, emotion, ethical knowledge, practical moral reasoning, and moral imagination—and their role in apprehending or responding to sources of value. This volume draws together contributions from leading international scholars in ancient philosophy, explorin…Read more
  •  2
    Aristotle on the nature of ethos and ethismos
    In Jeremy Dunham & Komarine Romdenh-Romluc (eds.), Habit and the History of Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 37-50. 2022.
    That character virtue is produced, according to Aristotle, through a process of moral habituation is a familiar feature of his ethics. And yet our feeling of familiarity with the notions of habit and habituation can engender a like feeling of familiarity with the process Aristotle describes, and encourage us to conceive of this process in an overly narrow way. In this chapter, I examine Aristotle’s notion of ethos and ethismos (habit, habituation) in the Nicomachean Ethics to better understand w…Read more
  •  140
    Aristotle on the Necessity of Habituation
    Phronesis 66 (1): 1-26. 2021.
    In Nicomachean Ethics 2.4 Aristotle raises a puzzle about moral habituation. Scholars take the puzzle to concern how a learner could perform virtuous actions, given the assumption that virtue is prior to virtuous action. I argue, instead, that Aristotle is concerned to defend the necessity of practice, given the assumption that virtue is reducible to virtuous action.
  •  64
    The Learner’s Motivation and the Structure of Habituation in Aristotle
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 104 (3): 415-447. 2022.
    Moral virtue is, for Aristotle, a state to which an agent’s motivation is central. For anyone interested in Aristotle’s account of moral development this invites reflection on two questions: how is it that virtuous motivational dispositions are established? And what contribution do the moral learner’s existing motivational states make to the success of her habituation? I argue that views which demand that the learner act with virtuous motives if she is to acquire virtuous dispositions misconstru…Read more
  •  117
    Imitating Virtue
    Phronesis 64 (3): 292-320. 2019.
    Moral virtue is, for Aristotle, famously acquired through the practice of virtuous actions. But how should we understand the activity of Aristotle’s moral learner, and how does her activity result in the acquisition of virtue? I argue that by understanding Aristotle’s learner as engaged in the emulative imitation of a virtuous agent, we can best account for her development. Such activity crucially involves the adoption of the virtuous agent’s perspective, from which I argue the learner is positi…Read more