Book project, Plato and Aristotle on Motivation and Agency (in progress).

This book offers a novel reading of Plato and Aristotle’s theories of agency and motivation, and their moral psychological and ethical implications. It provides an account of executive dispositions and virtues in these authors, and their role in acting well or failing to act as one should. As is well known, Plato and Aristotle are interested in the processes and deliberations that lead someone to make the right decisions and practical judgements. They are also concerned with appetites and pleasures that can sweep us off our feet, distract us, or compel us to act against these practical judgments. But these authors, I argue, are also keenly aware that we often fail to do what we should, and have resolved to do, because we lack strength, grit, and perseverance to stick to our commitments, even in the absence of appetitive temptations. For Plato and Aristotle, indolence, irresoluteness, weakness, or softness are failures of agency that have distinctive moral psychological underpinnings and ethical profiles. At the same time, they argue that resoluteness, strength, and perseverance are valuable character dispositions and traits, which should be habituated, trained, and nurtured. For these authors, executive strength is a condition for living up to one’s own considered commitments and for excelling in both personal and political projects. The book offers a new interpretation of spirit (thumos) and thumotic motivations and characters, lack of self-control (akrasia), weakness (astheneia), and softness (malakia), and self-control (enkrateia), industriousness (philoponia), and endurance (karteria). Furthermore, the distinctions defended in this book provide an interpretive framework for Plato and Aristotle’s much discussed claims about the agency of women and some groups of non-Greeks.

Crafting Race in Plato and Aristotle (co-edited with John Proios), under contract with Oxford University Press.

In recent years, we have seen a proliferation in ground-breaking work to recover historical views on marginalized identities, and to incorporate these topics into the historical narrative. As part of these efforts, a number of scholars are turning their attention to the history of race and racism. But when we look at the history of ancient Greek philosophy such topics seem conspicuously absent. There is no signicant undertaking among scholars of ancient Greek philosophy to discuss race in the works of the most central figures of ancient Greek philosophy—Plato and Aristotle—despite the fact that philosophy of race is a burgeoning field, and that scholars in fields adjacent to ancient philosophy, such as Classics and ancient history, have been developing a robust body of work on this subject (e.g. Snowden 1983, Hall 2002, Isaac 2004, Lape 2010, Kennedy et. al. 2013, McCoskey 2012 and 2021, Derbew 2022). Due to this scholarly gap, we lack a comprehensive picture of the different positions on, and assumptions about, race in the works of Plato and Aristotle. This scholarly lacuna creates, in turn, an instructional vacuum: without secondary texts to draw on, teachers of ancient Greek philosophy do not have the resources to educate students on the signicance of race in classical Greek philosophy. This volume of essays fosters conversation about these issues within the field of ancient Greek philosophy, thereby contributing to closing this gap. The contributions in this essay tackle methodological questions, examine the presence, scope, and significance of racializing discourses and arguments in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and address the reception of these philosophers’ views in later historical periods. Contributors to this volume include Toni Alimi, Cinzia Arruzza, Elena Comay del Junco, Sophia Connell, Ashley Lance, Julián Gallego, Marta Jiménez, Sukaina Hirji, Dhananjay Jagannathan, Mariska Leunissen, Hendrik Lorenz, Jackie Murray, Patrice Rankine, Christopher Raymond, Rachel Singpurwala, Adele Watkins, and Josh Wilburn.

You can learn more about this project here.