My research focuses primarily on ancient philosophy of mind: how the soul is related to the body, whether it has any distinctive causal power of its own, and how its states can represent the world or have content. I have looked at these issues especially in the Aristotelian tradition; but my long term research has been directed at the last question, concerning content, throughout the whole of Greek philosophy, from Parmenides and the sophist Gorgias, through Plato and Aristotle, to Hellenistic philosophers like the Stoics and beyond, to early medieval philosophers such as Augustine.
My approach to ancient texts is resolutely philosophical: I am interested in whether ancient philosophers’ arguments, analyses, distinctions, and concepts are good ones, and whether they have the resources to respond to questions and objections which their contemporaries, or our own, could put to them. Only in this way, I believe, can we take the true measure of their claims. This approach requires close readings of the text that must be sensitive to its original language and informed by an understanding of the context in which it occurs, both in the author’s works as a whole and in the intellectual tradition of which it is a part. But my ultimate aim is philosophical: I want to recover a sense of the interest and power of these ancient ideas and to see how they bear on our own discussions today.