Aristotle Contemplating Nature by Jacques Christophe Valmont-Bomare. 1791.
My research focuses on Ancient Greek philosophy, especially on issues in ontology, natural philosophy, biology, and political theory. In exploring these areas, I engage primarily with Aristotle, Plato, and Presocratic philosophers such as Empedocles and Heraclitus. My work examines these thinkers in their intellectual and historical context, and illustrates their deep and lasting influence on the history of philosophy, science, and culture.
My current research program explores Aristotle’s ontology of life and the continuing relevance of Aristotle’s thought for issues in contemporary philosophy of biology.
My book project, Aristotle’s Concept of Life: Essence and Activity, provides a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s substance metaphysics by focusing on the central role of living things in his ontology. Living things are “substances most of all”, he says, and may be the only things that truly count as substances. Yet Aristotle also claims that life is not a single essential nature shared by all living things. There are fundamental differences between forms of life—in particular, between mortal living things and the immortal life of the gods and stars. What is life, and why does Aristotle award living things this privileged ontological status? I argue against interpretations which seek to unify the concept of life by reference to a common principle (i.e., the soul) or by reference to a core or focal case (i.e., the Prime Mover). On my account, the unity of life is grounded instead in a shared ontological structure of self-constitution. According to Aristotle, living things fulfill their differing natures by performing certain life activities characteristic of their kind (such as metabolizing, reproducing, perceiving, discursive reasoning, etc.) While there is no single activity in which all forms of life participate, it is in and through the performance of these diverse activities that each living thing achieves its own nature. Life is not a shared identity, then, but a shared way in which identity is constituted: unlike chairs or piles of sand, living things actively make themselves what they are. My interpretation not only corrects the critical consensus on how Aristotle defines life, it also challenges traditional understandings of his essentialism about natural kinds. The essence of each living thing is not a static set of features that it instantiates or conditions that it meets, but rather a kind of activity that it performs (or fails to perform).
Recent Publications
“Aristotle’s Causal Definitions of the Soul” (PDF)
Ancient Philosophy 44 (2): 449-467. 2024.
Does Aristotle offer a definition of the soul? In fact, he rejects the possibility of defining the soul univocally. Because “life” is a homonymous concept, so too is “soul”. Given the specific causal role that Aristotle envisages for form and essence, the soul requires multiple different definitions to capture how it functions as a cause in each form of life. Aristotle suggests demonstrations can be given which express these causal definitions; I reconstruct these demonstrations in the paper.
“Aristotle on the Unity of the Nutritive and Reproductive Functions” (PDF)
Phronesis 65 (4): 414–466. 2020.
Co-Authored with James G. Lennox
In De Anima 2.4, Aristotle claims that nutritive soul encompasses two distinct biological functions: nutrition and reproduction. We challenge a pervasive interpretation which posits ‘nutrients’ as the correlative object (antikeimenon) of the nutritive capacity. Instead, the shared object of nutrition and reproduction is that which is nourished and reproduced: the ensouled body, qua ensouled. Both functions aim at preserving this object, and thus at preserving the form, life, and being of the individual organism. In each case, we show how Aristotle’s detailed biological analysis supports this ontological argument.
“Cosmic Democracy or Cosmic Monarchy? Empedocles in Plato’s Statesman” (PDF)
Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought 35 (2): 418-446. 2018.
Plato’s references to Empedocles in the myth of the Statesman perform a crucial role in the overarching political argument of the dialogue. Empedocles conceives of the cosmos as structured like a democracy, where the constituent powers ‘rule in turn’, sharing the offices of rulership equally via a cyclical exchange of power. In a complex act of philosophical appropriation, Plato takes up Empedocles’ cosmic cycles of rule in order to ‘correct’ them: instead of a democracy in which rule is shared cyclically amongst equal constituents, Plato’s cosmos undergoes cycles of the presence and absence of a single cosmic monarch who possesses ‘kingly epistēmē’. By means of a revision of Empedocles’ democratic cosmology, Plato’s richly woven myth is designed precisely to reject the appropriateness of democracy as a form of human political association and legitimate monarchy in its stead.
