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Dealing with Aristotle’s Indefensible IdeasIn David Keyt & Christopher Shields (eds.), Principles and Praxis in Ancient Greek Philosophy: Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy in Honor of Fred D. Miller, Jr, Springer Verlag. pp. 373-397. 2024.The indefensible ideas of Aristotle with which we shall be dealing are ideas such as that eels arise, not from eels, but from mud and slime, that the faculty of reason is not seated in the brain or in any other bodily organ, and that some humans are slaves by nature, ideas that are known, some twenty-three hundred years after they were written down, to be false. These ideas are a problem for a contemporary Aristotelian if they have been validly derived from the general principles of Aristotle’s …Read more
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L'éthique de Démocrite : équlibre psychique et crédibilité moraleIn Laurent Jaffro, Pierre-Marie Morel & Jean Salem (eds.), Matière, plaisir, bonheur: en mémoire de Jean Salem, Honoré Champion Éditeur. 2023.
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Socrates as HopliteAncient Philosophy 25 (2): 273-289. 2005.
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The Failures of Philosophy: A Historical EssayPrinceton University Press. 2020.The first book to address the historical failures of philosophy—and what we can learn from them Philosophers are generally unaware of the failures of philosophy, recognizing only the failures of particular theories, which are then remedied with other theories. But, taking the long view, philosophy has actually collapsed several times, been abandoned, sometimes for centuries, and been replaced by something quite different. When it has been revived it has been with new aims that are often accompan…Read more
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Athens and Oran: Heroisms in two plaguesIn Lee Trepanier (ed.), Diseases, Disasters, and Political Theory. pp. 164-173. 2022.In the autumn of 430 BCE, the city of Athens was devastated by a plague, one chronicled by both the Athenian historian Thucydides and the Roman poet Lucretius. Albert Camus’ notebooks and novel The Plague (La peste) clearly show his interest in the plague of Athens and several scholars have detected comparisons between its narrator, Dr. Rieux, and the historian Thucydides. But a careful examination of what Rieux actually says about the plague of Athens complicates matters and suggests that Camus…Read more
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Aristotle's Prior Analytics and Boole's Laws of thoughtHistory and Philosophy of Logic. 24 (4): 261-288. 2003.Prior Analytics by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 – 322 BCE) and Laws of Thought by the English mathematician George Boole (1815 – 1864) are the two most important surviving original logical works from before the advent of modern logic. This article has a single goal: to compare Aristotle’s system with the system that Boole constructed over twenty-two centuries later intending to extend and perfect what Aristotle had started. This comparison merits an article itself. Accordingly, this arti…Read more
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Plato's Philebus: Greek Text with Basic Grammar, 2nd Edition (2nd ed.)Kindle Direct Publishing. 2023.This commentary makes Plato’s Philebus accessible to second-year Greek readers and for scholars who read Greek only infrequently. We aim to help readers who wish to study the text more closely than translations permit. We hope readers new to Plato will be at ease with him by the time they complete the dialogue, but each page is self-contained: readers interested in only one passage need not worry that they have missed earlier remarks. Each page of the commentary contains about eight numbered lin…Read more
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Aristotle on “Nature Does Nothing in Vain”Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 7 (2): 246-271. 2017.Aristotle’s principle that “nature does nothing in vain” (NDNIV) is central to his teleological approach to understanding organisms. First, we argue that James G. Lennox’s influential account of NDNIV is unsuccessful. Second, we propose an alternative account that includes a natural state model. According to a natural state model of development, an organism will develop toward its natural state unless interfering forces prevent that from happening. Third, we argue that this account also fits Ari…Read more
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Camus, Philosophe: To Return to Our BeginningsBrill. 2015.
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What use is Aristotle's Organon?Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 9 261-285. 1993.
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The Appeal to Easiness in Aristotle’s ProtrepticusAncient Philosophy 39 (2): 319-333. 2019.In fragments from the Protrepticus, Aristotle offers three linked arguments for the view that philosophy is easy. According to an obvious normative worry, however, Aristotle also seems to think that the easiness of many activities has little to do with their choiceworthiness. Hence, if the Protrepticus seeks to exhort its audience to philosophize on the basis of philosophy’s easiness, then perhaps the Protrepticus provides the wrong sort of hortatory appeal. In response, I briefly situate Aristo…Read more
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Hobbes on Self-Preservation and SuicideHobbes Studies 4 (1): 26-33. 1991.
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The Teleological Significance of Dreaming in AristotleOxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 43 107-141. 2012.In his discussions of dreaming in the Parva Naturalia, Aristotle neither claims nor denies that dreams serve a natural purpose. Modern scholarship generally interprets dreaming as useless and teleologically irrelevant for him. I argue that Aristotle's teleology permits certain types of dream to have a natural role in end-directed processes. Dreams are left-overs from waking experience, but they may, like certain bodily residues, be used by nature, which does ‘nothing in vain’ and makes use of av…Read more
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Why Spirit is the Natural Ally of Reason: Spirit, Reason, and the Fine in Plato's RepublicOxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 44 41-65. 2013.In the Republic, Plato argues that the soul has three distinct parts or elements, each an independent source of motivation: reason, spirit, and appetite. In this paper, I argue against a prevalent interpretation of the motivations of the spirited part and offer a new account. Numerous commentators argue that the spirited part motivates the individual to live up to the ideal of being fine and honorable, but they stress that the agent's conception of what is fine and honorable is determined by soc…Read more
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Teaching Philosophy through a Role-Immersion GameTeaching Philosophy 41 (2): 175-98. 2018.A growing body of research suggests that students achieve learning outcomes at higher rates when instructors use active-learning methods rather than standard modes of instruction. To investigate how one such method might be used to teach philosophy, we observed two classes that employed Reacting to the Past, an educational role-immersion game. We chose to investigate Reacting because role-immersion games are considered a particularly effective active-learning strategy. Professors who have used R…Read more
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