•  215
    Aristotle and Protagoras against Socrates on Courage and Experience
    In Claudia Marsico (ed.), Socrates and the Socratic Philosophies: Selected Papers from Socratica IV, Academia Verlag. pp. 361-376. 2022.
  •  112
    Aristotle on Shame and Learning to Be Good
    Oxford University Press. 2020.
    This book presents a novel interpretation of Aristotle's account of how shame instils virtue, and defends its philosophical import. Shame is shown to provide motivational continuity between the actions of the learners and the virtuous dispositions that they will eventually acquire.
  •  348
    Plato on the Role of Anger in Our Intellectual and Moral Development
    In Laura Candiotto & Olivier Renaut (eds.), Emotions in Plato, Brill. 2020.
    In this paper I examine some of the positive epistemic and moral dimensions of anger in Plato’s dialogues. My aim is to show that while Plato is clearly aware that retaliatory anger has negative effects on people’s behavior, the strategy we find in his dialogues is not to eliminate anger altogether; instead, Plato aims to transform or rechannel destructive retaliatory anger into a different, more productive, reformative anger. I argue that this new form of anger plays a crucial positive role in …Read more
  •  481
    Empeiria and Good Habits in Aristotle’s Ethics
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 57 (3): 363-389. 2019.
    The specific role of empeiria in Aristotle’s ethics has received much less attention than its role in his epistemology, despite the fact that Aristotle explicitly stresses the importance of empeiria as a requirement for the receptivity to ethical arguments and as a source for the formation of phronêsis.1 Thus, while empeiria is an integral part of all explanations that scholars give of the Aristotelian account of the acquisition of technê and epistêmê, it is usually not prominent in explanations…Read more
  •  68
    Self-Love and the Unity of Justice in Aristotle
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (2): 413-429. 2019.
    In this paper I take up the question about the unity of justice in Aristotle and advocate for a robust relationship between lawfulness and equality, the two senses of justice that Aristotle distinguishes in Nicomachean Ethics V. My strategy is to focus on Aristotle’s indication in NE V 2 that “other-relatedness” is the common element shared by the two justices and turn to Aristotle’s discussion of the notion of self-love in EN IX 8 to explain what that means. I argue that the other-relatedness o…Read more
  •  1002
    Aristotle on Enduring Evils While Staying Happy
    In Pavlos Kontos (ed.), Evil in Aristotle, Cambridge University Press. pp. 150-169. 2018.
    In what ways and how far does virtue shield someone against suffering evils? In other words, how do non-moral evils affect the lives of virtuous people and to what extent can someone endure evils while staying happy? The central purpose of this chapter is to answer these questions by exploring what Aristotle has to say about the effects of evils in human well-being in general and his treatment of extreme misfortunes.
  •  429
    Aristotle ’s claim that we become virtuous by doing virtuous actions raises a familiar problem: How can we perform virtuous actions unless we are already virtuous? I reject deflationary accounts of the answer given in _Nicomachean Ethics_ 2.4 and argue instead that proper habituation involves doing virtuous actions with the right motive, i.e. for the sake of the noble, even though learners do not yet have virtuous dispositions. My interpretation confers continuity to habituation and explains in …Read more
  •  106
    Aristotle on “Steering the Young by Pleasure and Pain”
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 29 (2): 137-164. 2015.
    At least since Burnyeat’s “Aristotle on Learning to Be Good,” one of the most popular ways of explaining moral development in Aristotle is by appealing to mechanisms of pleasure and pain. Aristotle himself suggests this kind of explanation when he says that “in educating the young we steer them by the rudders of pleasure and pain” (Nicomachean Ethics X.1, 1172a21). However, I argue that, contrary to the dominant view, Aristotle’s view on moral development in the Nicomachean Ethics is not mainly …Read more