Office Hours – 2023W term 2:

• Mondays & Wednesdays, 12:00pm – 1:00pm
• Also by appointment
• Location: BUCH E269

Ancient Greek philosophy, ancient Greek natural philosophy and science, Aristotelian ethics, ethics and global poverty. I have written on the intersections between ancient Greek natural philosophy and natural sciences, including mechanics, medicine, optics, physics and theory of mixture. Although I have written on topics ranging over the entire period of Greek antiquity, many individual research papers concern the role of Hellenistic science on natural philosophy, especially that of the Aristotelian school. This culminated in a 2009 monograph on the impact of ancient Greek mechanics on ideas about causation and explanation of the natural world.

More recently, I have been writing on the metaethical foundations of Aristotle’s ethics, especially the role of naturalism in his thought, and the recent situationist critique of virtue ethics. My 2019 book on Aristotle’s ethics defends the notion that Aristotle was self-aware of second-order questions about the source of and justification for ethical demands, but denies that he thought the appeal to human nature could settle these questions.

In addition, I have interests in questions of ethics and global poverty.

Presentations

• ‘Aristotle’s Metaethics…and other Historical Monstrosities,’ Philosophy Department Colloquium, The University of British Columbia, November 2020
• ‘Aristotle, Human Nature, and Metaethics,’ Philosophy Department Colloquium, University of Texas at Austin, October 2016 and Classics Department Colloquium, University of Oregon, May 2018
• ‘Satisfaction to Ingenious Minds,’ Invited Panel on Mechanical Explanation in Aristotle, American Philosophical Association Eastern Division, Baltimore, January 2017
• ‘Reading Hobbes in Ixil Country,’ Latin American Research Group Workshop, University of Victoria, March 2017
• ‘Galen, Powers, and What the Mechanics Can’t Do,’ Northwest Ancient Philosophy Workshop, Victoria BC, October 2017 and Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Colloquium, University of Toronto, December 2017
• With Alison Wylie, ‘Witnessing and Stewardship: Reflections on Living with the Dead.’ Panel for Cultural Heritage, Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Communities, UBC, April 2018

• ‘The Clockwork Universe and the Mechanical Hypothesis’, British Journal of the History of Philosophy (2020), 1-18.
• ‘How Archimedes Proposed to Move the Earth,’ Isis 111,3 (2020), 1-6.
• ‘Is Global Poverty a Philosophical Problem?’ Metaphilosophy 50,4 (2019), 405-420.
• Aristotle on the Sources of the Ethical Life (Oxford 2019).
• ‘Aristotle in the Ethics Wars,’ Review of Metaphysics 71, 4 (2018), 617-42.
• ‘On a Curious Passage in Eudemaian Ethics ii 6,’ Ancient Philosophy 38, 1 (2018), 1-14.
• ‘Ideology, Inquiry and Antiquity: A Critical Notice of G.E.R Lloyd, The Ideals of Inquiry,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2015), 242-56.
• “It Makes No Difference’: Optics and Natural Philosophy in Late Antiquity”,  Apeiron: a journal for ancient philosophy and science, 45,3 (2012), 201-20
• “The Puppet and the Sage: Images of the Self in Marcus Aurelius”, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy (2010)
• The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, 2009)
• “Teleology Without Tears: Aristotle and the Role of Mechanistic Conceptions of Organisms”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 37 (2007), 357-70