If you're deeply puzzled about the very idea of philosophical research, some of your questions are on the page of RAQs. But many who are aware of what philosophical researchers generally do, and perhaps even of why they do it, are quite unclear about how they do it. At least, when I started doing philosophical research, I did not know what I was doing, and it took a while before my ignorance was overcome. I assume I am not alone in this experience. Most of us learn how to do philosophical research by trying to do it, with a lot of patient and helpful feedback from a lot of people. I also assume that this is not particular to philosophy or to research. It's just how skills and expertise are won.  

One thing I think I've learned is that philosophical research is most easily packaged and communicated when the researcher can say how their work advances a question that needs to be asked, an answer to an existing question of interest, or a new argument for an existing answer. (The academic economy encourages a piecemeal approach that does at most one thing per publication, and indeed encourages doing that one thing in multiple publications. But the most exciting philosophical work manages to do multiple things at once. And as important as packaging is for uptake on the market, the value of even unexciting philosophical research is not reducible to the packaged message (see the RAQs).) 

While a clear sense of the relevant questions and answers is required for effectively packaging and communicating a research project, it is not required to start one. In fact, it takes a lot of prior understanding—inherited or earned—to be able to articulate, in advance, what question you want to answer with a reasonable sense of how you might be able to answer it. Consequently, a lot of research starts in ignorance. Sometimes one starts with a large project whose guiding question is so general and so overworked as to be unlikely to inspire a reader's interest or confidence in the project. So the philosophy student starts trying to figure out what Aristotle's ethics is or what knowledge is. But sometimes even the novices start with a more specific question that is more promising of an interestingly novel answer. Typically this is a matter of luck. Either they ask a simple, appealing question in an area where the experts have, by chance, thus far (or at least recently) ignored that question, or they have lucked in to some advisor that hands them such a question.

Once one really learns a field, though, one does not have to luck into a topic by working from a broad question or being given one. With some acquired expertise, one can identify the good questions when circumstance presents them, and one's research will generate such circumstances. 

So it has seemed, at any rate, in my own career. I started with some broad projects, one of which led me to no interesting questions I could answer (Spinoza's politics) and the other of which ultimately led to several (the ethics and politics of Plato's Republic), and I also lucked into one terrific question early on (Stoic cosmopolitanism). The subsequent projects I've undertaken were sometimes foisted on me by circumstance (Plato on the soul, Epicurus on friendship and society, Stoics on uncertainty), and sometimes evolved out of earlier projects (The Choice of Career, Cynics). My work on Socrates and Eudaimonism is a mixture of sorts. For a long time, the general questions of who Socrates was and of how Greek ethics is a reasonable alternative to modern moral philosophy motivated me, but I don't think I saw either of these as research projects until I found a clearer set of more specific questions, which emerged from earlier work.  

My first real research project, the subject of my undergraduate thesis and a "preliminary essay" (see the RAQs!) in graduate school, was of the broad and inchoate sort. My project was to explain Spinoza's apparently contrasting accounts of the origins or grounds of the state in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, his Ethics, and his Tractatus Politicus, which became, in graduate school, the project of trying to say why Spinoza's approach, on my account, was interesting. 

I came to this by a series of happy accidents. As a second-year undergraduate, I took a course advertised as a survey of metaphysics and epistemology. But the instructor, Leonard Linsky, apologized on the first day that the course's title was a bit misleading, for it would really be an introduction to the metaphysics and epistemology of the seventeenth century, and then he apologized that even that was misleading, since we would just be reading Descartes and Leibniz. Anyhow, as the quarter progressed, Linsky spoke often of Frege and Spinoza, and for reasons entirely lost to me now, and perhaps for no good reason whatsoever, I decided I needed to learn more about Spinoza, but not Frege. Linsky directed me to Dan Garber, who generously agreed to do an independent study the next quarter. Garber had me read Spinoza's Ethica alongside Descartes' and Hobbes' accounts of the passions, and I became intrigued by the role of the passions in Spinoza's politics. I asked Garber if he might supervise a senior thesis on that topic, and he agreed. 

In graduate school, as I began to see more clearly what philosophers were trying to do when they wrote up their research, I also tried to rethink my account of Spinoza's politics to fit the model. I sought a way of showing how my interpretation of Spinoza's account of the formation of political community shed light on an interesting question. I'm now a bit embarrassed by what I came up with. But this was the 1990s, and graduate students were pressured not to publish. So this first research project was allowed to fizzle out, having done what it was supposed to do. It taught me a lot about how to do the history of philosophy, in large part because I was very fortunate in my advisor. 

In any case, my obsession with Spinoza—I even took a class on medieval Jewish mysticism in the Divinity School to try to get some more insight—had been eclipsed by my interests in the ancient Greeks. I still teach Spinoza occasionally, and I now think of his Ethica as the best work of Stoicism we have. But my research interests lie elsewhere. 

Upon finishing my "preliminary essay" on Spinoza, I had to find a topic for a dissertation. By this point, I had fallen in love with reading and thinking about Plato, and especially his Republic, so I tried hard for a good question here. I had written a couple of essays on Plato's use of myth for Arthur Adkins' seminars, and I was struck by the poverty of scholarly discussion of why Plato used myth. But my then-advisor, Chris Bobonich, talked me out of a dissertation on that topic on the grounds that it would be hard to sell to philosophy departments.

I was also drawn to some related questions Bobonich was asking in his classes, about Plato's understanding of non-philosophers and imperfect virtue. But Chris and my fellow graduate student Rachana Kamtekar were already working on those questions, and Chris (and one of his advisors, Bernard Williams, during a brief visit to Chicago) discouraged me from overcrowding this patch.

Instead, Chris encouraged me to pursue Hellenistic philosophy. It was good advice, as there were fascinating questions to be found there, and it was a much less crowded field. But I was so new to Hellenistic philosophy that I was unsure what to do. Chris had offered one course in Hellenistic philosophy, I think, and had convened a classical Latin philosophy reading group in which we'd read some Cicero and Lucretius. But it all still seemed mysterious, the texts scattered and daunting. It took a while before I found a topic, and a long while after that before I felt comfortable with the terms of the project. (See Stoic cosmopolitanism, below.) 

Fortunately, I did not have to leave my interest in Plato's Republic entirely behind. All my advisors were emphatic that that my dissertation should not be merely about Hellenistic philosophy, which might prove too obscure for the job market. Because most hiring committees would want to be confident that they were hiring someone expert in Plato and Aristotle, my dissertation would have to include a chapter on them. That is how one third of my dissertation's first chapter focused on the Republic and its account of why one would take up the political life. This was later published as "Justice and Compulsion for Plato's Philosopher-Rulers." 

The argument in "Justice and Compulsion" left an important question unsettled, about why the philosophers were committed to justice, and after I worked out an answer I was happy with, while teaching the Republic over and over again, I wrote up "Minding the Gap in Plato's Republic." 

One more question left lurking by those essays concerns the conception of eudaimonia in the Republic, and I've been working on that in an essay called, simply enough, "Eudaimonia in Plato's Republic." I've aired this essay several times now, and on each occasion, I've faced questions about how to square my take on eudaimonia in the Republic with the division of goods at the beginning of Republic II. I've also now refereed several essays attempting to make sense of that division, and it's become clear to me that people are confused about what is and is not going on in that passage. Hence, another essay: "Glaucon, Socrates, and Plato on Goods." These two essays converge on a single lesson: the argument in defense of being just in Republic II-IX is ad hominem. 

Those are the specific results of my inquiries into the main argument of Plato's Republic. They also appear in a more general and wide-ranging article for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the ethics and politics of the Republic. 

In part to help me think through some of the issues I need to address in that encyclopedia article, I have taken on some other, smaller projects about the Republic. So, for instance, I wrote some book reviews related to the Republic, on Aristotle's critique, on Plato's account of women, and on Plato on democracy. In addition, I commented on an essay by Fred Miller for a Spindel Conference in Memphis. Miller was keen to relate Plato's political theorizing to modern questions about political legitimacy, and did so, or so it seemed to me, by attributing to Plato some modern suppositions about "reason." I counter-proposed with "Plato on the Rule of Wisdom." For another instance, during the pandemic, I participated via zoom in an APA symposium about a paper by Allison Piñeros Glasscock that stimulated all sorts of ideas about the Republic's account of education, and out of that session, I formed the plan to co-author one paper on the Republic's talk of philosophical nature with Allison and another on its account of erōs with Rachel Singpurwalla. I'm still far from done with Plato's Republic.

Back in 1994, heeding Chris Bobonich's advice, I was reading around in Hellenistic ethics and looking for a dissertation topic. Fortunately, Martha Nussbaum was visiting Chicago and offered to do an independent study with me. I proposed to read Cicero's De officiis, I think only because I hadn't yet but thought I should. When I handed her a paper called "Cosmopolitanism vs. Patriotism in Cicero's De officiis," she revealed her own deep interests in this question, as her first essay on cosmopolitanism was soon to appear with replies in the Boston Review. (That issue was later published as a book called For Love of Country). Martha urged me to write a dissertation about what the various Stoics meant by saying that human beings are or at least should be citizens of the cosmos.

So I did. The dissertation I defended in 1997 included one long chapter on Plato’s Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—the background I was required to offer to appease the market—two long chapters on Chrysippean ethics, and one long chapter on De officiis. I’d got as far as seeing that there was a significant difference between some Stoics on the question of cosmopolitanism, and I’d got a bit of the way toward grasping how to characterize that difference. 

During the next six years, until 2003, I worked through a lot more Stoicism, and came to think that Seneca and Marcus Aurelius had cosmopolitanisms distinctive enough to deserve their own chapters. I also came to a better grasp of what the whole project was saying, thanks in large part to my then-colleague Pauline Kleingeld, who was working on cosmopolitanism in late eighteenth-century German thought. 

I concluded that the Stoics' cosmopolitan claims have three layers of meaning. First, "living as a citizen of the cosmos" is a metaphor for living a good human life. Traditionally, a Greek lives well by living up to the norms of his polis. Chrysippus argues that one should live up to the norms of nature by living in agreement with right reason, which is rational coherence, the same as the right reason that governs the cosmos. Later Stoics deflate this metaphor. On their view, citizenship in the cosmos is not earned by agreeing with right reason but is conferred automatically to all human beings, by virtue of our rational nature. 

Second, the Stoics maintain that living as a citizen of the cosmos is not a mere metaphor because it requires showing what I call "cosmopolitan concern," which is concern that one owes to every other human being but does not owe to any nonhuman animal or nonliving thing. Stoics differ among themselves about what sorts of feelings and actions cosmopolitan concern requires, and about whether these or those special people (friends, family, compatriots in a local community) deserve special concern beyond cosmopolitan concern. But they all agree in the thought that humans as such deserve special concern, which is a minimal cosmopolitan thought. 

But third, the Stoics argue for more than this minimum. They maintain that cosmopolitan concern requires not just refraining from some actions and not just showing something like respect. So much had already been acknowledged clearly by Plato's Socrates. The Stoics go further by saying that cosmopolitan concern requires working to benefit human beings as such, at least in some circumstances. That is, they think that in at least some circumstances, we should try to help even total strangers, and not merely family-members, friends, and compatriots. The most interesting evidence for this cosmopolitan beneficence emerges in Stoic discussions of what career a person should take up. They favor political engagement because it can benefit more people than other careers, and they typically urge that one could emigrate to engage politically and benefit people more readily. But, again, the Stoics disagree among themselves on whether the consideration to benefit humans as such by a political career needs to be balanced against special considerations to benefit these particular humans because they are compatriots in a local community. I argue that the Stoic texts that urge special obligations to compatriots (Cicero's De officiis and various works by Seneca) are problematic, and that the Stoic texts that take a stricter line on benefiting humans as such (fragments of Chrysippus, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations) are more promising than most current discussions of cosmopolitanism would seem to predict.

I made my case for these conclusions in a book-manuscript called Stoic Cosmopolitanism, which comprises eleven chapters:

1. Recovering the Original Cosmopolitan's Challenges

2. Varieties of Cosmopolitanism

3. Agreeing with the Cosmos

4. Cosmopolitan Justice

5. The Cosmopolis

6. The Cosmopolitan's Ideal Politics

7. The Cosmopolitan's Ordinary Politics

8. Cicero's Strictly Patriotic Cosmopolitanism

9. Seneca, Torn Between Two Cities

10. Marcus Aurelius, Citizen of the Cosmos

11. The Possibility of Cosmopolitanism

Cambridge University Press accepted that manuscript in 2003 and has been patiently waiting for the final revisions. I've recently been tying up some loose ends by working on one essay called "Stoic Anti-Slavery"and another about Cynic politics called "Cosmopolitanism and Anarchism," and I expect that the third, and last, version of this project will be sent to the press soon. 

I hope that Stoic Cosmopolitanism, "Stoic Anti-Slavery," and "Cosmopolitanism and Anarchism" will be in print by the end of 2025. In the meantime, you can find a strand of the book's argument in an essay titled "The Stoic Invention of Cosmopolitan Politics," and you can also see some of my findings put in larger contexts in the following:

• "Cosmopolitanism" (co-authored with Pauline Kleingeld)

• "Hellenistic Cosmopolitanism"

• "The Emergence of Natural Law and the Cosmopolis"

If you're a glutton for punishment, you can also watch a talk I gave a few years ago about the implications of Stoic cosmopolitanism for their account of friendship.

• "Cosmopolitans and Unmet Friends" (video, handout)

As you can probably tell from the account of how I fell into the above projects, I was (and am) especially drawn to questions about how human beings should live together. But I ended up working on ancient Greek and Roman treatments of these questions, in particular, because I found their psychological theorizing to be deeper and more plausible than what I saw in modern moral and political philosophy and because I admired the ancients' systematic approach. 

So, despite my primary orientation toward practical philosophy, I spend a lot of time thinking about (ancient) epistemology and metaphysics, too. Most of my attempts to get clearer about these topics have not strayed far beyond the classroom. 

The exception involves Plato's account of soul, because I could not resist a few special opportunities. 

The first came while I was working on my dissertation in Cambridge and was volunteered to lead a Thursday (or was it Tuesday?) seminar session on Plato, Republic X 608c-611a, where Socrates argues that the soul is immortal. The scholarly discussions of this argument were deeply and unanimously critical, but it seemed to me that it was valid and non-question-begging, which is about all one could hope for with this particular conclusion. (The main premise is that if the natural evil of X cannot destroy X, then X is indestructible, to which Socrates adds that the natural evil of the soul is vice and that vice cannot destroy the soul.) After I presented my take on the argument, I was encouraged to write it up for publication, and that's how my first publication came to be: "A Defense of Plato's Argument for the Immortality of the Soul at Republic X 608c-611a." 

Subsequently, I was invited to comment on three interesting works about Platonic psychology. First, I was invited to comment on Mary Louise Gill's essay on "the nature of the whole" in Plato's Phaedrus for the Henle conference at St. Louis University. my comments were published in the conference proceedings as "Knowing the Whole: Comments on Mary Louise Gill, 'Plato's Phaedrus and the Method of Hippocrates." Later, I was invited to serve as a "critic" for an "author meets critic" session on Verity Harte's Plato on Parts and Wholes. While this did not spawn a publication directly, thinking with Verity was hugely helpful for my later work on psychic unity in Plato. But that work followed more directly from an invitation to comment on a paper by Jennifer Whiting at a conference in Toronto. Jennifer's essay "Psychic Contingency in the Republic" and my subsequent stab at "The Unity of the Soul in Plato's Republic" were published in this volume. 

I am not sure whether I will try to pursue my questions about Plato's account of the soul further. The next steps, it seems to me, are daunting, as they require answering very general questions about Platonic metaphysics. 

During my first sabbatical, 1999-2000, I spent some time revising and expanding my dissertation, some time reading some Plato and Aristotle that I had not yet read, and some time doing philosophy with Pittsburghers. This last undertaking led me to read an essay John MacFarlane had written on Epicurus' account of friendship. He had an excellent reckoning of how Epicurus praised friendship as instrumentally valuable, for the sake of painlessness—not far, as I recall, from the interpretation that Matt Evans would publish a few years later—but his essay struggled to make sense of Sententia Vaticana 23, which is standardly understood to say that friendship is choiceworthy for its own sake. I came to think that the standard interpretation of SV 23 is mistaken. I wrote up my thoughts for a talk at the annual meeting of what was then called the American Philological Association, and then published them as "Epicurus on the Value of Friendship (Sententia Vaticana 23)." 

A few years later James Warren invited me to revisit Epicurean thoughts about friendship in a broader chapter on Epicurean politics for The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism. My chapter on "Politics and Society" is, I suspect, the last thing I will write about Epicurus on friendship, and I think readers interested in Epicurus on justice would be better served by the comprehensive recent treatment by Max Robitzsch. But if you look at my two essays on Epicureanism, you'll see some seriously unsettled speculation about Epicurus' account of pleasure. I have been trying to get clearer on that, though I might not write anything about it outside my account of Epicurean eudaimonism (see below). 

Is it possible to be interested in ancient Greek philosophy without being interested in Socrates? It's certainly possible to avoid thinking of Socrates as a special research project. You need only adopt a skeptical stance toward the "Socrates Problem:" if all our sources for the historical Socrates reflect too much their authors' own concerns, then we have no good access to Socrates himself. (Consider, for instance, Louis-André Dorion's take.) I came to adopt that skeptical stance after a few years of inquiry, but I've more recently become optimistic about identifying the historical Socrates. It's a long story.

Skepticism about the "Socrates Problem" was not the vibe in the early to mid-1990s when I was a graduate student. The vibe was Vlastosian, thanks to Gregory Vlastos' vigorous 1980s essays (collected in Socratic Studies or absorbed into Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher [SIMP]), the work of Vlastos' former student Terry Irwin, and the work of those who had attended Vlastos' NEH Summer Seminar on Socrates (including Hugh Benson, who had recently edited a new volume of essays on The Philosophy of Socrates, and Tom Brickhouse and Nick Smith, who had recently written Plato's Socrates, the second of their many books on the subject). Vlastos maintained (most clearly in SIMP) that a set of Plato's dialogues depicts the historical Socrates. 

Obsessed with Plato as I was, and wanting to understand the Socratic background to Plato's Republic, I tried to work out "the philosophy of Socrates" in the Vlastosian vein. I pretty quickly developed enough skepticism to doubt Vlastos' claim that a certain set of Plato's dialogues offer an accurate portrait of the historical Socrates, on the grounds that Plato's own creativity infuses his portrait. But I retained the assumption that Plato's character Socrates in some of Plato's dialogues (such as the Crito and Laches) had a distinct philosophy from the views expressed by that same character in other dialogues (such as the Phaedo and Republic), and I retained the impression that this "Socratic" philosophy was closer to the historical Socrates than any other reckoning antiquity offered. 

None of this gave me anything distinctive to say, and so I did not have a research project on "Plato's Socrates," let alone on the historical Socrates. I was just another person interested in the Socrates who appears in a subset of Plato's dialogues, content to do so in a fully Vlastosian vein but without accepting Vlastos' confidence that this was the way to solve the "Socrates Problem." 

My differences from the other scholars interested in "the philosophy of [Plato's] Socrates" emerged gradually, and they developed when I took seriously Stoic thoughts about Socrates. 

First, when I was working on Stoic Cosmopolitanism as a graduate student, I noticed some Stoic and Stoic-influenced sources who characterized Socrates as a cosmopolitan, and I asked myself whether this was a plausible characterization. It seemed to me that a relatively uncontroversial reading of Plato's Socrates could support it. I wrote this up as part of the first chapter of my dissertation, and later spun it off as "Socrates the Cosmopolitan." 

By the time I published that essay, I was also teaching Plato's Socratic dialogues regularly, and coming to the view that on a wide range of issues, the Socrates of these dialogues is much closer to the Stoics than to Aristotle. Then, for ten years (2003-2012), I had the good fortune of attending an annual ancient philosophy conference at the University of Arizona, where the focus was almost always on Plato's Socratic dialogues, and I tried out again and again a more Stoic reading of Plato's Socrates, dialogue-by-dialogue. Some of these papers, including especially early versions of "Socrates the Stoic" and "Socrates on Coherent Desire" (the latter co-authored with Clerk Shaw) were also part of a larger project on eudaimonism (see below), but all of them involved some rethinking of Plato's Socrates and thus, ultimately, a slow return to the question of Socrates himself. 

As I worked on various dialogues, I grew increasingly skeptical toward the Vlastosian project of articulating the philosophical doctrines of Plato's Socrates. Those working on this project were debating whether Plato's Socrates accepted this or that claim in this or that dialogue, in search of a full reckoning of all the claims that Plato's Socrates accepted in the specific set of dialogues marked off as "Socratic" sources of "the philosophy of (Plato's) Socrates." Very often, these debates center on whether Socrates is being ironical or sincere in this or that passage, or on whether this or that premise in a Socratic refutation is embraced by Socrates or advanced ad hominem (that is, merely dialectically). This of course allows for a range of views about exactly what theses belong to "the philosophy of Socrates," and I came to think that the list should be short. This put me at the more skeptical end of the scholars interested in the philosophy of Plato's Socrates, but it didn't yet underwrite doubts about the whole project of trying to articulate the philosophical doctrines of Plato's Socrates.

I came to those doubts when I began to question whether Plato's Socrates cared about expressing his philosophical views. If this Socrates is primarily focused on refuting others' claims to know how to live well and on exhorting them to care more about wisdom and justice, then why should he care to make clear to onlookers how he would answer all the questions he was asking? 

That is, I came to think that Plato's Socrates reveals rather few doctrines in part because he is not really interested in revealing his doctrines. He might not even have many doctrines, but in any case, his conversational interests lay elsewhere. So I came to think that the scholars engaged in the Vlastosian project of articulating the precise doctrines of the "philosophy of Socrates" on the basis of what Plato's Socrates says in some dialogues were missing the heart of Plato's Socrates, who was trying to advance philosophy not as a set of precise doctrines but as a certain set of practices, the practices of a developed ability to be humanly wise and just.

And if that is right, then Socrates might really be committed to very few theses in the "Socratic" dialogues, and he might remain committed to these same theses in Plato's "non-Socratic" dialogues. This would not deny that the Phaedo and Republic (for examples) introduce commitments that go beyond what Socrates avows in the "Socratic" dialogues, but it insists that what Socrates avows in the "Socratic" dialogues remains in place in the Phaedo and Republic. So there remains some point to distinguishing the Socratic and the non-Socratic in Plato's dialogues, but the point is not to locate the threshold after which Plato rejected what he saw as Socratic. Rather, Plato always recognized few Socratic tenets, and he never has his character Socrates reject any of them. 

I have recently summed up my take on Plato's Socrates in two complementary essays, "Plato's Socrates and his Conception of Philosophy" and "Socratic Methods." These were written to suit the general handbooks they are in, and can easily be read as entries in the Vlastosian project of defining the "philosophy of (Plato's) Socrates." They certainly summarize some disputes entrenched in the Vlastosian scholarship and even suggest a few novel (or at least nearly novel) interventions in those disputes. But I would like to think that the picture of Socratic philosophy that emerges in those two essays also calls for turning away from the Vlastosian project, first because they call for defining Socratic philosophy in a way that downplays a developed list of doctrines and second because they minimize the disagreement between the Socrates of Plato's "Socratic" dialogues of the Socrates of Plato's other dialogues. If Plato's Socrates is not a philosopher with many worked out doctrines, and if his few commitments are consistent across all of Plato's dialogues, then there is no Vlastosian "philosophy of Socrates." 

Finally, this take on "the philosophy of Plato's Socrates" has brought me back to the question of Socrates himself. If I am right about Plato's Socrates, then this might also be a plausible account of the historical Socrates. That is, ironically, Vlastos might have been right to insist that Plato stayed close to the historical Socrates. Of course, Vlastos thought that Plato stayed close to the historical Socrates only in a few dialogues, and he thought that everyone other than Plato totally failed to capture Socrates or even deliberately misrepresented him. My suggestion would be less polemical. Imagine that Socrates was an enigmatic man of a few characteristic commitments and practices, including the practice that engages dialectically with the views of others. This fits with Plato's portrait (as I read Plato). It would explain why some report that Socrates was enigmatic. (Think of what Alcibiades says in Plato's Symposium.) It would also explain why such divergent doctrines were advanced by people who professed to be followers of Socrates. Finally, it might allow us to suppose that there is a common, historical core to the different portraits that Plato and Xenophon and Aristophanes offer. 

That's where I am now, imagining that the "Socrates Problem" is solvable if we think of Socrates himself as an enigmatic man of just a few characteristic commitments and practices. An essay I wrote some time ago about the Stoics' treatment of Socrates points in this direction (see "Socrates in the Stoa"), but I haven't yet argued directly for the minimal picture of the historical Socrates. I have recently outlined one way of arguing for it, but I need to do more work before I am in a good position to write it up. I've been spending a lot more time with the Socratics and especially the Cynics (see below). And SLAGRAP, the reading group for ancient Greek philosophy here in St. Louis, has been reading Xenophon's Memorabilia. 

How is Greek ethics an alternative to modern moral philosophy? 

I have been asking myself this general question since I first found myself drawn to the ancient Greek accounts over the modern ones. In graduate school, I was reading Plato and Aristotle but also Parfit and Rawls, and I couldn't shake the thought that Parfit seemed silly and Rawls boring. Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, and Philippa Foot seemed more interesting to me, but they also seemed to recommend a lot of hard thinking about the ancients. So I dove into ancient ethics. But as I tried to figure out what the ancients were up to, I was also trying to understand that in relation to modern moral philosophy.

The scholarship was telling me that we needed to invoke eudaimonism to explain ancient ethics as an alternative to modern moral philosophy, but I did not fully trust this answer until I realized how to clarify it. By the early 2000s, I had started to see the deep connections between Plato's Socrates, the Cynics, and the Stoics—see Socrates above and The Choice of Career below—and I saw that these Socratics identified eudaimonia with doing well (eu prattein), doing well with acting virtuously, and acting virtuously with acting wisely. Also, I had by then convinced myself (see Epicurus on friendship above) that Epicurus did not identify eudaimonia with any sort of activity, but only with a state of painlessness. So there seemed to me to be two deeply different eudaimonisms. Both sides agree that a person should act always for the sake of their eudaimonia. But the Socratics would insist that one does this by instantiating eudaimonia: since eudaimonia is simply virtuous activity, one acts for the sake of eudaimonia by acting virtuously. The Epicureans, by contrast, had to see eudaimonia as a consequence of virtuous action. Their eudaimonism is an egoistic species of consequentialism. 

I decided that this was going to be a book-project during or immediately after a conversation with Richard Kraut during the Henle Conference in 2002. I started to see essays I had already written as part of this book-project, and I started to outline other chapters that I would need to write. At one point, I was asked to present a paper on Hellenistic attitudes towards contemplation, and I wrote up "Contemplative Withdrawal in the Hellenistic Age," which put the contrast between Socratic and consequentialist eudaimonism in print. But most of my work on this project has not yet been published, and as I've accumulated drafts of potential chapters, it increasingly seems as though I will have to divide this book into two, Plato and the Origins of Eudaimonism and The Eudaimonist Alternative after Plato. 

A taste of my thoughts about eudaimonia in Plato's dialogues can be found in "Plato on Well-being." The core thought is that Plato's Socrates consistently identifies living well with doing well, doing well with acting virtuously, and acting virtuously with acting wisely. This comes up briefly in  "Plato's Socrates and his Conception of Philosophy," but in the book, I want to show how Socrates puts these thesis to work, especially in the Euthydemus and Meno ("Socrates the Stoic") and the Gorgias  ("Socrates on Coherent Desire"). (For more on these essays, see Socrates, above.) 

But above all, I want to show Plato's Socrates motivates and uses the basic eudaimonist principle—one should act always for the sake of one's eudaimonia—without committing himself to egoistic consequentialism. In the Apology and Crito, Socrates articulates the thought that he would rather die than do something that is not wisdom-loving or just. This is the core thought of Socratic eudaimonism: one should act always for the sake of acting wisely-and-virtuously. It emerges to explain Socrates' own unconditional commitment to wisdom and justice. 

The other unfinished chapters about Plato's Socratic eudaimonism fend off objections. One might think that Socrates has to be a consequentialist eudaimonist because he thinks that wisdom is the expertise of living and that each expertise is productive, that is, each expertise is defined by the product it makes. Or one might think that he explicitly adopts consequentialist eudaimonism when he construes the wisdom he seeks as a measuring art. Or one might think that he assumes consequentialist eudaimonism when he compares philosophy to medicine, which is the expertise that produces health. The essential point about these maneuvers is that they are intellectual dalliances as compared to Socrates' commitment to philosophizing and acting justly. But careful attention to how the dalliances begin and what their limits are reveals some interesting possibilities.  

One might also doubt the story I tell about Socratic eudaimonism on the grounds that it makes acting wisely the ultimate goal, while the end of the Meno seems to suggest that acting on true belief is just as good as acting wisely. I think this misreads the Meno, and I've written up why in "Meno on the Value of Wisdom." 

Then, whatever one thinks about Plato's Socratic dialogues, one might think that "the mature Plato" is no eudaimonist, since he thinks that philosophers should sacrifice their own eudaimonia and rule the ideal city, or one might think that this Plato's conception of eudaimonia includes goods other than virtuous activity. I argue against the former in "Justice and Compulsion for Plato's Philosopher-Rulers," "Minding the Gap in Plato's Republic," and "Plato on the Rule of Wisdom," and I argue against the latter in "Eudaimonia in Plato's Republic" and its companion "Glaucon, Socrates, and Plato on Goods." (For more on these essays, see the ethics and politics of Plato's Republic, above.)

Another worry about Plato's eudaimonist commitments emerges in the Philebus, where Socrates' defense of the mixed life of pleasure plus knowledge might seem to encourage a broader account of the ultimate good. This, I think, would be a misreading. I think the real challenge posed by the Philebus—and by other dialogues, including especially the Phaedo—is the thought that the ultimate good that makes the good mixture a good mixture and makes a life go well is not virtuous activity broadly, but a narrower intellectual achievement that fully belongs not to this life but to the next. This complicates Plato's picture but does not, or so I want to argue, undercut his Socratic eudaimonism. But this work is still very much in progress, and it does not even enter into my brief survey of Plato's thoughts about eudaimonia called "Plato on Well-being." 

I've also drafted some essays that will be chapters in the volume about eudaimonism after Plato. A couple of chapters seek to explain how Aristotle recognizes the importance of external goods without surrendering his belief that the ultimate good is simply virtuous activity. One, "Wishing for Fortune, Choosing Activity," offers a reading of EN I 8-13, and another, "Aristotle on External Goods and Eudaimonia" explains how every final good apart from virtuous activity is for the sake of eudaimonia without being part of eudaimonia. 

I also plan to discuss two puzzles post-Platonic philosophers confront about the thesis that one should act always for the sake of acting virtuously. One puzzle concerns time: how long is the virtuous activity one should take to be one's ultimate good? The other concerns the non-virtuous: given that the virtuous should act for the sake of their eudaimonia simply by acting virtuously, what are the non-virtuous supposed to do. The latter is drafted, the former only sketched. 

I am also eager to explain how the egoistic, consequentialist eudaimonists came to their curious views. First, why did some of Aristotle's Peripatetic followers abandon Socratic eudaimonism for a broader consequentialist view that identifies eudaimonia with virtuous activity plus other goods? My current thoughts on this place the blame on Carneades. I suspect that his taxonomy of ethical theories, designed to make trouble for the Stoics, also made trouble for Peripatetics, by driving them to a clumsier, problematic view. But I haven't fully convinced myself that the rot didn't set in before Carneades starting making mischief. Much of my uncertainty concerns the Magna Moralia. The origins of the Peripatetics' muddle aside, I am not in much doubt that it is a mistake. I have been trying to convince myself that Cicero saw this, despite his own attractions to the Peripatetic position. 

Second, if Socratic eudaimonism is marked by a high evaluation of activity that survives reflection—wise and virtuous activity—it might seem obvious that one alternative to it would be a relatively unreflective hedonism. This is in fact what we find with the Cyrenaics. But Epicurus provides a rather different, more reflective hedonism that at least some Epicureans took to be a rather different eudaimonism. What leads Epicureans to this position, and what exactly is wrong with it? I'm still playing around with the first of these questions, but I've spent a lot of energy trying to answer the second. I think that Cicero has his finger on something interesting in his critique of Epicurean ethics in De finibus II ("Animality and Contingency and Cicero's Critique of Epicurean Ethics"). 

I continue to work on various parts of this project when my schedule makes it convenient, and I aim to put the completion of Plato and the Origins of Eudaimonism at the top of my agenda as soon as Stoic Cosmopolitanism is done. 

What kind of career should you have? 

That's not a question that looms large in today's philosophy journals and classes, but it received a lot of attention from the Greeks. On the one hand, Greek city-states depended for their survival on the cooperation of their citizens, so there were regular calls for political engagement that sharply contrasted virtuous, manly politicians and vicious, womanly devotées of "the quiet life." On the other hand, the development of philosophy as a distinct way of life raised questions about how the philosopher would relate to politics. Most of the philosophers agreed in rejecting a simple life of pleasure-seeking, and in insisting that living well required philosophy. But whether living well required or even accommodated political engagement remained in dispute. Moreover, while many philosophers assumed that living well required the leisure that wealth brings, Socrates and some of his Socratic followers (especially Cynics and Stoics) found philosophy to be incompatible with care for wealth while insisting that it was compatible with working for a living. 

My interests in the Greek disputes about "ways of life" (peri biōn) emerged in graduate school, when I got the thought that the Stoics considered our obligations to help human beings as such when they considered whether (and how) to take up a political career. (I don't remember where that thought came from, but I remember when it was clear to me that it would be a useful thought. That was during a helpful lunch conversation with Malcolm Schofield.) Hence, large parts of Stoic Cosmopolitanism concern this literature, in the service of questions about how the Stoics understood living as a cosmopolitan.

As a result, the choice of a career question lurks in the essays spawned by the first chapter of my dissertation: "Socrates the Cosmopolitan," "Justice and Compulsion," and "Aristotle on the Choice of Lives." It also lurks in "Contemplative Withdrawal in the Hellenistic Age," which concerns more narrowly the value of contemplative activity, which some but not all Greeks characterized as the ultimate good of the philosophical life. 

I have also tackled two facets of the career question at greater length, trying to figure out what it is to live a political life or to discharge one's political obligations and trying to figure out what it is to live a philosophical life. 

The first facet, concerning the political life and political obligations, has most directly engaged me on three occasions. 

Once, I was preparing to teach Plato's Statesman and found myself unsatisfied with what other scholars had said about the first argument in the dialogue, which turns on how Plato conceives of the art of politics. That led to "Plato on the Unity of the Political Arts (Statesman 258d-259d)." 

Another time my then-colleague Ryan Balot invited me to write a chapter on the political significance of Greek withdrawals from the political life, which led to "False Idles: The Politics of the 'Quiet Life'." 

A third time, I was wrestling with why scholars tend to dismiss the evidence (Diog. Laërt. VII 121-122) that prominent Greek Stoics were opposed to slaveholding. Some seem to suppose that if one is really opposed to slaveholding, one must be an abolitionist, and that no Stoics were abolitionists. There's much to think about here, but one thing is this: how much political action against such-and-such is required of someone who recognizes the injustice of such-and-such?  This occupies my attention in "Stoic Anti-Slavery."

The second facet of the general career question, concerning the philosophical life, has seemed to me increasingly important. Over the years, I've become drawn to broader, pluralistic accounts of what philosophy is, and less and less tolerant of the narrow, prescriptive accounts of what counts as philosophy that I internalized as a young philosopher. As my own thoughts about what philosophy is and should be have developed, I've also paid more attention to what the ancient Greeks thought it was. How did Greek philosophers see themselves as philosophers? What was philosophy, to them? 

I have played with the hypothesis that at least some Greek philosophers saw themselves as philosophers in relation to Socrates as a model. That is to say, these heirs shared a sense of what Socrates had done, what practices he had engaged in and what values he had upheld, and they saw themselves as philosophers insofar as they could relate their commitments to these practices and values. 

I discuss how Plato articulated and questioned the Socratic model in "Plato's Socrates and his Conception of Philosophy" (for more, see Socrates, above), how the Cynics can be understood as Cynics in relation to Socrates in "Cynics," and how the Stoics might derive some of their most distinctive paradoxical claims by reflecting on Socrates in "Socrates in the Stoa." 

It would be a mistake to think that the Socratic model is the only model of philosophy that we've inherited from ancient Greece—the nature-theorists (phusiologoi), Aristotle and the commentators, and Philo of Alexandria provide other models—but I do think that if you want to grapple with the problems and potential of ancient Greek philosophy and the traditions it has spawned, you should give a lot of thought to Socrates. More generally, I suspect that those who see themselves as philosophers have always and everywhere done so in relation to some model of what philosophy is that is provided by some particular tradition, and I think it's worth thinking about the ways in which these models inform and constrain what philosophers do.  

What I hope all this work shows is that the ancient disputes about careers or "ways of life" raise difficult and interesting questions about what it is to live well. There needs to be a new study of the Greek literature on "ways of life." The standard reference, Robert Joly's Genres de vie, is unreliable. I don't know that I will ever find the time to write that study, though, in part because I keep finding myself more interested in other questions that are linked to it. 

My interest in the Cynics emerged first in relation to their alleged cosmopolitanism. According to Diogenes Laërtius, "when he was asked where he was from, Diogenes of Sinope used to say, 'I am a citizen of the world,'" (VI 63) and Diogenes says "that the only correct constitution is the one in (the) cosmos" (VI 72). 

There is a deflationary account of this evidence: Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé has argued that Diogenes' claim to be a cosmopolitan is a purely negative claim, a denial that he is a citizen of any particular city, and she has argued that the thesis about "the only correct constitution" is a projection of Stoic ideas back onto the Cynics. But some scholars, especially John Moles, have tried to argue that Diogenes had a cosmopolitan mission to spread teach Cynic wisdom to human beings as such. 

From the start, Moles' case seemed to me a stretch, but I didn't have a good handle on why, so my early drafts of Stoic Cosmopolitanism (and related writings) tended toward Goulet-Cazé's "negative" reading without really arguing for the point. I despaired of coming to grips with the evidence for ancient Cynicism, and focused on the better evidence we have for ancient Stoicism. 

But then I was asked to write a chapter on the Cynics for the Routledge Handbook to Ancient Philosophy, which was supposed to stand out from other such handbooks by attending more to methodological issues and explaining how to gather and interpret the evidence. So I gathered and studied all the evidence for ancient Cynicism, which made me, if anything, even less confident that I could come to grips with it all. As a result, in "Cynics," I had to content myself with a bird's eye account of how ancients made sense of Cynicism as a philosophy, by comparing the commitments manifest in the stories about Diogenes to the basic commitments of Socratic philosophers more generally. (See above, on the choice of lives.) 

More recently, I've been invited to write an essay on Cynic politics for a Cambridge Companion to Cynicism and an overview of ancient Cynicism for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). So I have been working my way toward more committed stances on the general question of how to interpret the difficult evidence for ancient Cynicism and on the particular question of what, exactly, Cynic cosmopolitanism amounts to.

The evidence for Cynicism is difficult because we have so few quotations from early Cynic writings. (It's far worse than the situation for early Stoicism.) We have a few paraphrases of Cynic writings, many of them hostile (e.g., Philodemus' reports of Diogenes' Republic in On the Stoics). But we don't even have much in the way of paraphrases of Cynic doctrines that purport to represent what the early Cynics really thought (as opposed to what it is to be a "true Cynic" or a "true philosopher"). 

Instead, for the earliest Cynics, we have lots of anecdotes. Unfortunately, these anecdotes—which were all the rage among Socratics in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE and which remained popular in late antiquity, in educational handbooks and in the training of orators—were told not because they were literally true but because they were useful, and they were even called "uses" (chreiai). They were useful in conveying the "philosophical" or "Cynic" character of Antisthenes or Diogenes or Crates, and of course their usefulness did not depend on their being literally true. Embellished and wholly invented stories could still convey what kind of person this or that philosopher was. No doubt some of the stories are literally true, but we should not think that most of them are, and worse, we have no good way of distinguishing the true from the false. So we should probably treat them all as myths, stories that are literally false though they contain some truth. 

What we're looking for, then, is the "inner truth" that is expressed by these anecdotes, and seeing how these "inner truths" fit with our limited evidence for early Cynic doctrines. 

For the Cambridge Companion, I've come to an ecumenical view about Diogenes' "cosmopolitanism." I think that he was, in a "negative" way, a cosmopolitan by his disengagement from politics, and he was, in a "positive" way, a cosmopolitan by his teaching of others, without regard to citizenship. But I've got a more controversial take about what makes Cynic political thought distinctive. In my view, neither the disengagement nor the pedagogy mark Cynicism as distinctive. Rather, what makes Diogenes' political thought distinctive is how anti-political it is: he rejects laws and rulers as obstacles to independence (autarkeia) and freedom (eleutheria). So, his Republic cannot be a constructive vision of how we might live together, as Zeno the Stoic's Republic is. It must be a parody of Plato's Republic. The political theorizing of Plato's Republic starts from the claim that no human being is naturally self-sufficient (autarkēs), but every human being naturally needs others to help them satisfy their necessary desires, the desires to live and to live well. Diogenes and his pupil Crates reject this principle. They hold that an individual human being can live self-sufficiently or independently (autarkōs). That is why they speak of cultivating an order (kosmos) within, which means that each aims to live as a citizen of an internal, individual kosmos. This "individualist" "cosmopolitanism" is a distinctive view. It resembles what we call anarchism, but it is not as constructive as most anarchism, since it does not urge the cultivation of a society without a state. Instead, Cynicism urges the cultivation of an internal order, to live independently and freely. Here is a draft of this.

For the SEP survey, I have the good fortune of collaborating with Isabelle Chouinard, and we will have our article up in late Summer 2025. Because this article will require some revision every few years after that, I plan to continue thinking about the Cynics.  

I've long been interested in Stoic epistemology, given how deeply intertwined it is with Stoic ethics. But my attempts to get clearer about it have been limited to the classroom until recently. Dominic Bailey asked me to write something about how the Stoics handle uncertainty for the Oxford Handbook of Stoicism, and this has proven to be a stimulating challenge.

Stoics think we should not opine. That is, roughly, we should not believe anything unless we are sure that it is true and could not be false. But the Stoics also think that if we don't accept an impression that it is appropriate to φ, our soul won't φ. (To φ simply is to take it that φing is appropriate.) So if we don't have a perfectly certain ("kataleptic") impression that it is appropriate to φ, we cannot φ without opining. And if we don't have perfectly certain impressions relevant to our consideration of whether to φ—are those real fruit or just decorative facsimiles?—we cannot decide whether to φ without opining on the relevant matter.

The Stoics have a general strategy for minimizing our uncertainty—we should cultivate expertise—but this strategy will not eliminate uncertainty, because even experts are regularly uncertain about the future, and our impressions about the future are relevant to our impressions about what we should do. The Stoics need a further strategy to evade the dilemma of inaction or opinion. 

The scholarly literature has considered two such strategies. One is suggested by the early Stoic Sphaerus. He suggests that when one is uncertain whether X is F, one can still sometimes be certain that it is reasonable that X is F. Another is suggested by the Stoic doctrine that the sage forms every impulse "with exception." Some scholars take this to be the view that every impulsive impression can be rendered kataleptic by the addition of "exception" to its content.

I came to think that these strategies do not succeed. Sphaerus can get us certainty about how things seem, but not certainty about how they are, and "exception" can get us a reminder about our uncertainty, but not an automatic upgrade to certainty.

Instead, I believe that the Stoics do not need, and do not try, to convert non-kataleptic impressions about whether to φ into kataleptic ones, and they do not need, and do not try, to convert non-kataleptic impressions about practically relevant matters into kataleptic ones. Rather, they think that one can experience a kataleptic impression that it is reasonable to φ by "following" without endorsing and accepting non-kataleptic impressions about practically relevant matters. They think, for instance, that one can grab one of those things in the bowl as a snack (with certainty that it is appropriate to do so) on the assumption that they are fruit, without believing that they are fruit. 

If "Stoics on Uncertainty" is right, the Stoics are closer to the Academics than most scholars have seen, since they agree with the Academics that we can follow mere impressions, without assenting to them, even though they continue to disagree with the Academics by insisting that actions or feelings— motions of the soul—require assent. 

In the course of this work, I also came to think that when the Stoics characterize how to "withhold assent" from non-kataleptic impressions, they do not endorse "suspending judgment" (epechein) as the Academics say they do. Rather, the Stoics see the "suspension of judgment" as a characteristic Academic attitude. The Stoics prefer, instead, "to stand still and silent" (hēsuchazein). 

This is among the Stoics' terminological quibbles, but these are never merely quibbles. The Stoics think that they are tracking a real difference. In this case, the Stoics think that when an Academic "suspends judgment," they are holding back affirmations (apophaseis) generally, on the basis of their experience with opposing arguments, including their arguments opposing the existence of kataleptic impressions. So just as the Academic thinks that the Stoics are skeptics in denial, the Stoics think that the Academics are dogmatists in denial. But this disagreement is not merely a matter of two philosophers talking past each other. It is a disagreement that reveals two different ways of thinking about how the human mind does and should respond to uncertainty. So I think that our account of the debate between the Academics and Stoics needs updating in a second way, too.  I have drafted "Stoics on Epochē"  for a Festschrift for Liz Asmis.