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49Psychological Causes in Plato’s PhaedoAncient Philosophy Today 4 (2): 196-216. 2022.Nearly all of us would accept that at least some of our thoughts – desires, beliefs, and intentions, for example – can be causally responsible for movements in our bodies. Starting in antiquity, and especially since Descartes, philosophers have deployed this claim as the pivotal premise in an increasingly popular line of argument against dualism. The purpose of this paper is to show that, in the Phaedo, Socrates uses this very same claim as the pivotal premise in a surprisingly powerful two-part…Read more
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26Book Review: Plato and Aristotle’s Ethics (review)Journal of Moral Philosophy 3 (3): 372-374. 2006.
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747A Partisan's Guide to Socratic IntellectualismIn Sergio Tenenbaum (ed.), Desire, Practical Reason, and the Good, Oxford University Press. pp. 6. 2010.
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677Plato on the Possibility of Hedonic MistakesOxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 35 89-124. 2008.
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4Lessons from Euthyphro 10 A-11 BIn Brad Inwood (ed.), Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2012.
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102Plato on the Norms of Speech and ThoughtPhronesis 56 (4): 322-349. 2011.Near the beginning of the Cratylus (385e-387d) Plato's Socrates argues, against his friend Hermogenes, that the standards of correctness for our use of names in speech are in no way up to us. Yet this conclusion should strike us, at least initially, as bizarre. After all, how could it not be up to us whether to call our children by the names of our parents, or whether to call dogs “dogs“? My aim in this paper will be to show that, although Plato's argument does not succeed in establishing this a…Read more
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270Plato's Anti-Hedonism'Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 23 (1): 121-145. 2008.
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561Plato's Rejection of Thoughtless and Pleasureless LivesPhronesis 52 (4). 2007.In the Philebus Plato argues that every rational human being, given the choice, will prefer a life that is moderately thoughtful and moderately pleasant to a life that is utterly thoughtless or utterly pleasureless. This is true, he thinks, even if the thoughtless life at issue is intensely pleasant and the pleasureless life at issue is intensely thoughtful. Evidently Plato wants this argument to show that neither pleasure nor thought, taken by itself, is sufficient to make a life choiceworthy f…Read more
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649Plato and the Meaning of PainApeiron 40 (1). 2007.Most readers of ancient Greek psychology will agree that the Philebus is where we find Platos best attempt to theorize about bodily pain.1 But they will probably also agree that the account he develops there has no real chance of being true, and so should not have much appeal to us today at least insofar as we are philosophers rather than historians. Its this second conviction that I want to challenge in what follows. More specifically, I want to argue for two connected claims about the meri…Read more