Research Interest
Socratic dialogues of Plato, Socratic ethics, Aristotle's ethics, virtue ethics generally.
I received my PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Spring of 2020, defending a dissertation titled Socratic Piety, Reciprocity, and the Last Elenchos of Plato’s Euthyphro. The project was supervised by Vanessa de Harven (chair), Melissa Mueller, Ernesto Garcia, and Jyl Gentzler of Amherst College. Prior to coming to Nazarbayev University, I taught at the University of Hartford. My interest in pedagogy and promoting greater public access to philosophy led me to leave academia for a time to teach high school philosophy at the Loomis Chaffee School, a boarding preparatory school in Windsor, Connecticut.
Though I specialize in Ancient philosophy, especially Plato, my philosophical interests range far beyond what I have written on to date, and include: ancient scepticism, Hume, Peirce, various topics in ethics like moral internalism and moral particularism, epistemology generally, philosophical pedagogy, and the impact of philosophy and philosophical education on public discourse.
3. “Esteem, Honor, and the Folly of Commemorating Whole Persons” This paper argues that traditional acts of commemoration invite imprecise moral evaluation because they obscure the distinction between what is praiseworthy in an agent and what is not. I argue that there are more fitting ways to express esteem for a meritorious act than traditional forms of honor, ways that are more directly connected to the virtues or excellences the act instantiates.
PHIL 210 Introduction to Ethics
