Research

My current research falls into two general categories: (1) vice and moral improvement in Plato and Aristotle, and (2) the relationship between law and virtue in Plato's Laws.

Book

1. Plato’s Legal Moralism: The Laws. Cambridge University Press. (MS due to press Jan 2028.)

The legislative project of Plato’s Laws is a kind of legal moralism. For one of the project’s guiding ideas is that the central purpose of law is to promote the virtue of citizens. This Element considers the conception of virtue that Plato is working with in the Laws, and examines the various ways that law promotes it. It is argued that while virtue is a harmonious condition of the soul, attaining (and maintaining) such harmony will often require that one is able to overcome misguided non-rational impulses. The law plays a crucial part in this life-long process. Initially, by governing various educational institutions tailored towards the young, the law directs the youthful soul towards harmony by shaping the child’s emotions to accord with reason, well before they come into their own as a rational being. As one matures, however, misguided non-rational impulses tend to rise up in opposition to reason. At this stage, the law must accomplish its aretaic end in different ways. I discuss two. First, through its persuasive and punitive content, the law directly impacts the soul by stimulating certain psychic forces, such as respect and fear, that enable people to overcome enticements to vicious and irrational behaviour. The cumulative effect of this, when paired with continued education and experience in correct living, progressively redirects the soul towards harmony. Second, by structuring the daily lives and activities of citizens, the law creates a range of opportunities where citizens can express the virtues in the context of their own lives. Repeated participation in the ways of life structured by law serves to entrench the correct evaluative outlook that citizens have been developing since childhood, leading to a genuine appreciation of value. This enables people to experience a more robust kind of inner harmony, while also reinforcing their ability to confront misguided non-rational impulses that might arise. By examining the legal moralism of the Laws, this Element shows how Plato can plausibly maintain that the law, when properly utilized, is an indispensable tool for moral development.

Articles

1. "The Tyrant’s Regret." Ancient Philosophy, special volume on Plato’s Republic Book VIII and IX. (Initial submission.)

This paper argues that the regret (μεταμέλεια) experienced by the tyrannical soul in Plato’s Republic is a kind of moral regret—it indicates that the tyrannical soul is somehow aware of its wrongs, and it disapproves of having done them. This kind of regret is possible because of conflict between the soul’s corrupted evaluative perspective, which is active and guides the agent’s behaviors, and its uncorrupted desire for the good, which is latent and fails to guide the agent’s behavior. When a person with a tyrannical soul acts in accordance with the former, the latter is dissatisfied, and μεταμέλεια occurs. For at that moment, the agent senses that they have done wrong, but they cannot understand why, since their natural longing for the good has been suppressed to a point where its dissension is barely felt—it makes itself heard, but quickly retreats back into psychic latency, being overpowered by the soul’s more dominant, corrupted evaluative perspective.

2. "Two Models of Virtue in Plato’s Laws." Elenchos: Journal of Studies on Ancient Thought. (Accepted. Publication date: 2027.)

In Books 1 and 2 of the Laws, Plato seems to endorse two incompatible models of virtue. According to one, virtue is the victory of reason over the non-rational through situations of unavoidable psychic conflict. According to the other, virtue is the harmony between reason and the non-rational, where psychic conflict is avoided. I reconcile these two models by showing that although inner harmony is the ultimate goal, it cannot always be acquired and enjoyed without interruption. For if misguided non-rational forces rise up in opposition to reason, the latter must secure victory over the former. This is an admirable achievement when it is necessary, but the proper end of victory is not to dominate non-rational forces once and for all. It is to reform them and integrate them into the psyche, leading the agent toward harmony. I defend this view by first showing how it aligns with the Athenian’s attitude about the value of political victory and harmony. Next, I explain how it coheres with the Athenian’s conception of education and its tendency to decay. Finally, I argue that this view of virtue is implied in the practice of supervised intoxication—an important educational institution with aretaic aims. 

3. "Curable and Incurable Vice in Aristotle", Ancient Philosophy 45 (1): 221-236. 2025.

I argue that central to Aristotle’s account of vice is a distinction between two varieties of vicious person: those for whom character change is possible (the curable), and those for whom it is not (the incurable). Recognizing this distinction and drawing out the ideas which ground it shows why Aristotle’s discussions of vice in EN vii and ix 4 are not inconsistent.

4. "Preambular Persuasion as Proleptic Engagement: The Legislative Strategy of Plato's Laws", The Classical Quarterly 74.2, 485-498. 2024.

In the Laws, Plato argues that legislation must not only compel, but also persuade. This is accomplished by prefacing laws with preludes. While this procedure is central to the legislative project of the dialogue, there is little interpretative agreement about the strategy of the preludes. This paper defends an interpretation according to which the strategy is to engage with citizens in a way that anticipates their progress toward a more mature evaluative outlook, and helps them grow into it. This paper shall refer to this strategy as proleptic engagement. While the virtuous ways of life required by law are intimately connected to happiness, the preludes do not persuade by spelling out this connection. Rather, they persuade by telling citizens what they need to hear so that they can come to appreciate this connection for themselves, in the context of their own lives. While the preludes are many and varied, this paper argues that all preambular material can be understood as proleptic engagement.

5. (with Rachana Kamtekar) "Happiness (eudaimonia)", Bloomsbury Handbook of Plato, 2nd edition, Gerald Press and Mateo Duque (Eds), 251-253. 2023.

In contemporary usage, ‘happiness’ is sometimes taken to be a feeling, as temporary or permanent as feelings are. In ancient Greek usage, by contrast, eudaimonia, the term translated ‘happiness’, characterizes a whole life and not just a moment of feeling, and has an objective dimension: the happy life not only feels good to the one who lives it, but is good. Sometimes translators use ‘flourishing’ instead; one ground for this is that not only humans, but other species as well, are said to flourish when they are in a good condition relative to their capacities, but it was for the ancients a philosophical issue whether eudaimonia ought to be conceived this way, and indeed whether a life of pleasure not only feels good to the one who lives it but also is the best life; the same philosophical issue arises today about happiness, and it cannot be settled by a translation (see Kraut 1979). The same may be said, mutatis mutandis, for other expressions treated as equivalent to eudaimonein (being happy) in Plato’s dialogues, such as eu zen (living well), eu prattein (doing well).

Reviews

1. Review of James Warren, Regret: A study in Ancient Moral Psychology, The Philosophical Review 134 (3), 351-355. 2025.

Regret: A Study in Ancient Moral Psychology is an exemplary work on an undertheorized phenomenon: metameleia, or regret. James Warren considers a range of ancient accounts and brings these into conversation with contemporary issues. Besides his interpretative suggestions, Warren engages with the ancients on strictly philosophical grounds, exploring implications of their arguments and applying their frameworks to new questions. Regret is a valuable contribution to ancient moral psychology and will inspire further work.

Dissertation (Cornell, 2024)

Legislating for virtue: an essay on virtue and law in Plato’s Laws

It is Plato’s view in the Laws that promoting the virtue of citizens is the primary goal at which the laws should aim. This is a basic normative standard that the interlocutors design Magnesia’s law-code in accordance with, and it serves to situate the legislative project of Laws squarely in the perfectionist realm. A theory of this kind must be able to answer three basic questions: (1) What is law? (2) What is virtue? (3) How does the former promote the latter? I reconstruct Plato’s answers to all three, so as to unite the dialogue’s central ethical and political commitments.