Philosophy

Socrates: A Conference in Honor of Nicholas D. Smith,

October 17-19, 2014

 

Conference Speakers

 

Emily Austin is assistant professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University.  She works primarily on ancient ethics and moral psychology.  Her published work concerns ancient treatments of negative emotions, especially grief, malice, and the fear of death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

Hugh H. Benson is a Samuel Roberts Noble Presidential Professor.  He is author of Socratic Wisdom (OUP 2000) and Cltiophon’s Challenge (OUP in press), and the editor of Essays on the Philosophy of Socrates (OUP 1992) and A Companion to Plato (Blackwell 2006). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


David Ebrey, is an assistant professor at Northwestern University.  He works on topics across ancient philosophy, including issues in metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, and the foundations of natural science. His research, so far, has been on the role of matter in Aristotle’s natural philosophy, syllogisms in Aristotle’s logic, Plato’s Meno and Phaedo, Socratic inquiry, moral education, and Platonic forms.  He was a Mellon post doc at Berkeley (2007-2009) and has received an Alice Kaplan Humanities Institute Fellowship (2011-2012) and a Spencer Foundation Grant (2012-2013). In 2013 he was a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge.

In recent years his undergraduate courses have included a survey course on ancient philosophy, a freshman seminar on Socratic dialogues, and advanced courses on Aristotle’s scientific works and on Aristotle’s logic and scientific methodology. He has also taught graduate seminars on Plato’s Meno, Plato’s Phaedo, Plato’s Forms (two-quarters long), Aristotle’s Physics II, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Beta, and matter in Aristotle’s natural philosophy.

 

Russel Jones   is an assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard University, where he has taught since 2010.  His work focuses primarily on Plato, with a bit of Aristotle sprinkled in.  Recent publications include work on wisdom and happiness in Plato’s Euthydemus, a debate on Socratic moral psychology with Brickhouse and Smith, and a piece arguing that Socrates didn’t take his life to be a happy one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Keith McPartland is an associate professor of philosophy at Williams College where he has been teaching since 2007. He was an undergraduate at Rutgers University and received his PhD from Cornell University in 2009. He works primarily on Aristotle and Plato and is especially interested in issues in metaphysics and moral psychology.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

William J. Prior was born in Rutland, Vt. In 1946, he graduated from Michigan State University in 1968 and earned his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975. He taught at the University of Colorado in Boulder from 1975 to 1986. Beginning in 1986 he taught at Santa Clara University, from which he retired in 2013. He is the author of two books in ancient philosophy: Unity and Development in Plato’s Metaphysics (1985) and Virtue and Knowledge (1991). He is the editor of Socrates: Critical Assessments (4 v., 1996). He is also the author of over twenty articles, chiefly in Greek philosophy. 

 

 

 

 


Naomi Reshotko is professor of philosophy at the University of Denver.  She specializes in Classical Greek Philosophy, metaphysics and epistemology and action theory.  She publishes in the areas of Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology and Socratic psychology. Additionally, she has published articles applying Socratic psychology to contemporary discussions of the role of desire in human behavior and applying Socratic ethical ideas of value to debates concerning “invasive” species.  She is the author of Socratic Virtue: Making the Best of the neither-good-nor-bad (Cambridge, 2006) and is currently engaged in a project on the relationship between Plato’s metaphysics and his epistemology. Most recently, the project has resulted in the article, “Plato on the Ordinary Person and the Forms” (Apeiron 47/2, 266-292).

 

 

George Rudebusch is a professor of philosophy at Northern Arizona University. His books include Socrates, Pleasure and Value (Oxford) and Socrates (Wiley-Blackwell).