Princeton University
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2016
CV
Oxford, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy
  •  11
    Stoic Eros
    Cambridge University Press. 2024.
    "Stoic erôs" sounds like a contradiction in terms. The ancient Stoics are notorious for their claim that the ideal human life is free of passion. So when it comes to arguably the most passionate emotion of all, we might expect them to take a uniformly dim view. Just like anger, fear, grief, and the other passions censured by Stoic theory, erotic love would seem to have no place in the best human life. In fact the Stoics distinguish two forms of erôs. In vicious agents erôs is indeed a passion an…Read more
  •  101
    Does Seneca entirely reject the utility of dialectical study for moral improvement? No, I argue here. Focusing on Letter 87, I propose that Seneca raises and disarms objections to formal Stoic arguments in order to help moral progressors avoid backsliding and advance towards ethical knowledge. I trace this method back to Chrysippus and show that reading Letter 87 in this Chrysippean framework yields a satisfying explanation of its otherwise puzzling features.
  •  1041
    Epicureans and Stoics on the Rationality of Perception
    Wiley: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (1): 58-83. 2023.
    This paper examines an ancient debate over the rationality of perception. What leads the Stoics to affirm, and the Epicureans to deny, that to form a sense-impression is an activity of reason? The answer, we argue, lies in a disagreement over what is required for epistemic success. For the Stoics, epistemic success consists in believing the right propositions, and only rational states, in virtue of their predicational structure, put us in touch with propositions. Since they identify some sense-i…Read more
  •  70
    The Starting-Points for Knowledge: Chrysippus on How to Acquire and Fortify Insecure Apprehension
    Phronesis: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy 67 (1): 62-98. 2022.
    This paper examines some neglected Chrysippean fragments on insecure apprehension (κατάληψις). First, I present Chrysippus’ account of how non-Sages can begin to fortify their insecure apprehension and upgrade it into knowledge (ἐπιστήμη). Next, I reconstruct Chrysippus’ explanation of how sophisms and counter-arguments lead one to abandon one’s insecure apprehension. One such counter-argument originates in the sceptical Academy and targets the Stoic claim that insecure apprehension can be acqui…Read more
  •  613
    One Stoic response to the skeptical indistinguishability argument is that it fails to account for expertise: the Stoics allow that while two similar objects create indistinguishable appearances in the amateur, this is not true of the expert, whose appearances succeed in discriminating the pair. This paper re-examines the motivations for this Stoic response, and argues that it reveals the Stoic claim that, in generating a kataleptic appearance, the perceiver’s mind is active, insofar as it applie…Read more
  •  374
    Psychological disease and action-guiding impressions in early Stoicism
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (5): 784-805. 2021.
    The early Stoics diagnose vicious agents with various psychological diseases, e.g. love of money and love of wine. Such diseases are characterized as false evaluative opinions that lead the agent to form emotional impulses for certain objects, e.g. money and wine. Scholars have therefore analyzed psychological diseases simply as dispositions for assent. This interpretation is incomplete, I argue, and should be augmented with the claim that psychological disease also affects what kind of action-g…Read more
  •  672
    Stoic logic and multiple generality
    Philosophers' Imprint 20 (31): 1-36. 2020.
    We argue that the extant evidence for Stoic logic provides all the elements required for a variable-free theory of multiple generality, including a number of remarkably modern features that straddle logic and semantics, such as the understanding of one- and two-place predicates as functions, the canonical formulation of universals as quantified conditionals, a straightforward relation between elements of propositional and first-order logic, and the roles of anaphora and rigid order in the regime…Read more
  •  722
    This essay considers how ancient Stoic cosmopolitanism – roughly, the claim all human beings are members of the same “cosmopolis”, or universal city, and so are entitled to moral concern in virtue of possessing reason – informs Stoic thinking about how we ought to treat non-human entities in the environment. First, I will present the Stoic justification for the thesis that there are only rational members of the cosmopolis – and so that moral concern does not extend to any non-human part of the n…Read more
  •  28
    The Stoics on Lekta: All There Is To Say by Ada Bronowski (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 58 (3): 609-610. 2020.
    In this wide-ranging study, Ada Bronowski reconstructs the Stoic account of lekta. Usually translated into English as "sayables," lekta—Bronowski transliterates all key Greek terms—number among the Stoics' most contentious proposals in antiquity and remain the subject of interpretative disagreement today. One clear Stoic commitment is that lekta are what is signified by human speech: my utterance "Dion walks" in normal circumstances signifies the lekton 'Dion walks.' Are lekta to be understood, …Read more
  •  476
    Creating a Mind Fit for Truth
    Ancient Philosophy 38 (2): 357-381. 2018.
    This paper offers a new defense of the externalist interpretation of the kataleptic impression. My strategy is to situate the kataleptic impression within the larger context of the Stoic account of expertise. I argue that, given mastery in recognizing the limitations of her own state of mind, the subject can restrict her assent to kataleptic impressions, even if they are phenomenologically indistinguishable from those which are not kataleptic.
  •  1309
    Here I propose an interpretation of the ancient Stoic psychological theory on which (i) the concepts that an adult human possesses affect the content of the perceptual impressions (φαντασίαι αἰσθητικαί) she forms, and (ii) the content of such impressions is exhausted by an ‘assertible’ (ἀξίωμα) of suitable complexity. What leads the Stoics to accept (i) and (ii), I argue, is their theory of assent and belief formation, which requires that the perceptual impression communicate information suitabl…Read more