Published Work:
Justice, Ruling, and the Craftsman in Republic i” in Ancient Philosophy 46 (1): 41–64.
Book 1 of the Republic is home to perhaps Plato’s most direct and controversial arguments for thinking about justice and ruling along the lines of a technê (expertise, art, skill, or craft). It is commonly thought that a central lesson of book 1 is to indicate the flaws of the technê model for justice and ruling. This paper provides a novel defense of Socrates’ arguments, one that situates them in the larger context of Plato’s understanding of technê. I show that the concept illuminates justice and ruling in interesting and fruitful ways and in ways that still resonate with us today. Taking a richer understanding of what Socrates has in mind when he speaks of a ‘technê’, I demonstrate that (i) book 1 is less hostile to the technê model than often supposed and that (ii) Socrates’ arguments from technê are more successful than often supposed.
Book Review:
Works-in-Progress:
A Fork in the Road: Politics as the Master Art in Plato’s Gorgias
*Upcoming Talk: Annual Toronto Workshop in Ancient Philosophy 2026: Ancient Political Thought
A recurrent theme in Plato’s political philosophy is the idea that politics should be the kind of knowledge that will control subordinate forms of expertise and use their products or results to promote the good. This paper argues that we also find this idea in the Gorgias, in a striking but neglected passage (Grg. 517c4–518a7) where Socrates argues that true politikê is the art that is entitled to rule all the other arts and use their products to tend to the wellbeing of the soul (517e3–518a7). I show that this characterization of politikê is not casual, but the culmination of one important strand of the dialogue’s critique of rhetoric: the pseudo-art disrupts the rule of knowledge and the place of truth in political deliberations and decision-making. In this strand, I argue that rhetoric is presented as a pseudo master art, one that gratifies people’s appetites, especially for wealth and power. This picture of rhetoric sheds light on our key passage and provides us with the resources to sketch a fuller account of what true politikê might look like in contrast.
The Unity of Sôphrosunê: Self-Knowledge and Knowledge of Knowledge in Plato’s Charmides
*To be completed as part of my 2026-2027 fellowship at The Center for Hellenic Studies.
The Charmides is one of Plato’s classic ‘Socratic’ dialogues. It is a short work that takes up the search of a particular virtue as its central task. On this occasion, Socrates and his interlocutors, Charmides and Critias, are investigating the virtue of sôphrosunê—temperance or moderation. The dialogue culminates in an obscure argument between Critias and Socrates that claims sôphrosunê is both knowledge of the self (165c4–7) and knowledge of itself (166c2–3). The former is proposed by Critias as a gloss of the Delphic dictum “know thyself”, (164d4-5) and the latter is defined as a singular science or knowledge that has its subject matter “all other kinds of knowledge and of itself” (166c2-3). The dialogue oscillates between these two meanings of sôphrosunê without commentary and this ambiguity has gripped scholars and dominated much of the twentieth century interpretations of the work. Despite the purported seriousness of this puzzle and the dialogue's renewed scholarly interests, attempts to solve this interpretative difficulty have largely gone dormant. My paper revisists this interpreative puzzle with the aim of offering a unifying argument that helps us see the coherence of sôphrosunê.
Intersectional Projects:
Plato’s Republic: Ideal Theory as Ideology?
This project examines the relationship between ideal theory and conceptions of justice through the lens of Charles W. Mills. I investigate Mills’ influential critique that the Western canon, starting with Plato, pursues an idealized political reality that marginalizes and excludes what is real. I focus on developing alternative ways of thinking about ideal theory in the Republic.
On Xanthippe in Plato’s Phaedo and Christian De Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies
This work is part of contemporary feminist research efforts to expand the history of philosophy by presenting new narratives and recovering the voice of women in the traditional canon. I focus on comparing the contrasting portrayals of Socrates’ wife, Xanthippe during the last moments of Socrates’ life, in Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies and Plato’s Phaedo. This comparative work highlights how social expectations, especially from those who were authorized to speak, can often create real and harmful dispositions in women.