Language is a part of our world, but not in the same way as, say, atoms or colors or events. Rather, it has a sort of privileged status in disclosing the world, and it appears to be composed of peculiar entities like types, essences, and meanings. Many philosophers think that these entities do not exist in the “real world,” so they have long tried to understand their existence in an “ideal world.” How this might be so is endlessly fascinating to me, and my research tries to make sense of such ideality in Ancient Greek philosophy. Much of my current research is into the metaphysics of universals (or forms) and its linguistic counterpart, meaning.
PROJECT 1
My dissertation argued that Plato’s understanding of meaning cannot be adequately modelled in terms of semantic theories and that it extends to pragmatic, phonetic, aesthetic, and deictic aspects of language. I am currently finishing several papers and developing a monograph on this theory in the Cratylus.
PROJECT 2
I am also developing an account of Plato’s metaphysics of universals (forms) in relation to his interpretation of Heraclitus. I am working to demonstrate how Plato has a more nuanced interpretation of Heraclitus than has been previously recognized, and I argue that this changes how we should understand key aspects of Plato’s celebrated theory of forms. I am writing papers on this with respect to the Hippias Major and the Phaedo, and I intend to extend the analysis to the Protagoras, Symposium, and Parmenides.
OTHER PROJECTS:
CONCEPTUAL ENGINEERING: I am developing an account of how the new approach to philosophy called ‘conceptual engineering’ can make better sense of some of the debates surrounding the concept of justice in Plato’s Gorgias and Republic .
CITY OF PIGS: I am working on the puzzle of why Socrates would abandon a model city that is already healthy for a model city that has been healed of sickness.
Besides my main research, I always have my fingers in a few philosophical pies… I have a number of “back burner” projects on environmental ethics, medieval philosophy, philosophy of education, continental philosophy, and historiography.