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), 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. That led to my first publication, "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: Mary Louise Gill's essay on "the nature of the whole" in Plato's Phaedrus; Verity Harte's Plato on Parts and Wholes; and Jennifer Whiting's essay "Psychic Contingency in the Republic" (published in this volume). The first and third commentaries evolved into publications: "Knowing the Whole: Comments on Mary Louise Gill, 'Plato's Phaedrus and the Method of Hippocrates" and "The Unity of the Soul in Plato's Republic." The second was very much on my mind in the latter essay.

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)." That led to the chance to write up broader thoughts on Epicurus on "Politics and Society" for The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism. I doubt I’ll re-engage these questions directly, but I still feel the force of unresolved questions about Epicurean accounts of pleasure and I hope someday to come to a better answer to those.

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 particular 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 some years of inquiry, but I've more recently returned to some optimism about identifying the historical Socrates. It's a long story, starting in graduate school but bearing fruit only in the last few years.

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 what would become their uncountably 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. My attitudes were widely shared: most people interested in Socrates focused on the Socrates who appears in a subset of Plato's dialogues, in a fully Vlastosian vein but without accepting Vlastos' confidence that this was the way to solve the "Socrates Problem." 

To the extent that I thought I had something distinctive to say about "the philosophy of (Plato's) Socrates," it's because I was taking a wider view of the evidence. Working on Stoic Cosmopolitanism, 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 merely ad hominem. 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 offer 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 failed miserably to capture Socrates or even deliberately misrepresented him. My suggestion would be more ecumenical. 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 few 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 Eudaimonist Alternative and The Eudaimonist Alternative after Plato. Let me just sketch the story I want to tell.

In my view, the thesis of Socratic eudaimonism is clear in Plato's Socratic dialogues (I mean, the dialogues in which Socrates asks questions more than he develops answers). Socrates supposes that everyone wants to live well and treats living well as unconditionally good. He also identifies living well with doing well, doing well with acting virtuously, and acting virtuously with acting wisely. "Socrates the Stoic?" and "Socrates on Coherent Desire" show these views at work in the Euthydemus and Gorgias, respectively, but the main evidence is also cited in "Plato's Socrates and his Conception of Philosophy." (For more on these essays, see Socrates, above.) But to tell the story about Socratic eudaimonism in Plato's Socratic dialogues, I am also working on two other chapters. 

First, I have a story to tell about the origins or animating principle of Plato's eudaimonism. I do not think that Plato came to Socratic eudaimonism by thinking about eudaimonia, its role in our lives, and whittling away at it until he sees that eudaimonia is really just virtuous activity. That's the way Plato's Socrates induces someone who is not a philosopher to entertain the thesis, in the Euthydemus. But I doubt that it is the way Plato came to the thesis in the first place. Rather, I think that the thesis of Socratic eudaimonism suggested itself to Plato as the best explanation of Socrates' remarkable willingness to die rather than to cease philosophizing (Apology) and to die rather than to do something unjust (Crito). Plato was struck by the thought that Socrates values philosophizing and acting justly above everything else: they are Socrates' unconditional commitments. One way to put this is that of all the ends or goods Socrates thinks worth promoting, only philosophizing and acting justly are ultimate goods, valuable unconditionally and not for the sake of anything else. Everything else is valuable only on the condition that it is consistent with philosophizing and acting justly: everything else is, in this sense, but as Aristotle would put it, valuable "for the sake of" philosophizing and acting justly. If I am right about this, the animating principle of Socratic eudaimonism lies not in commonsense thoughts about what makes a life go well, as so much literature on eudaimonism suggests. Rather, it lies in a firm rejection of commonsense thoughts about what makes a life go well. It lies in an embrace of philosophizing and acting justly. It is a philosophical thesis that expresses the central commitments of Socrates' philosophical way of life.

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 and 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." 

One reason why people fail to recognize Plato (and Aristotle) as Socratic eudaimonists is that they assume that if something is finally good for a human being, it must be a part of that human being's ultimate good. But this is a mistake. As I have already alluded above, to think of something as the ultimate good is to think of it not merely as finally good but also as unconditionally good, and something can be finally good—valuable regardless of what might follow from it—without being unconditionally good—valuable in every circumstance. The division of goods in Republic II is about final value—things valuable independent of their consequences and things valuable because of their consequences—whereas the talk of the good for a human being in Book Six is about unconditional value—something unconditionally valuable for a human being. Once one sees this simple contrast, one can more easily appreciate how Plato (and Aristotle) think, for instance, that pleasant amusement is finally good without being unconditionally good. That is, one should not pursue pleasant amusement viciously, but only on the condition that one is acting virtuously, but one can value pleasant amusement as an end, independent of any consequences that might follow from it. Similarly, friendship is valuable as an end, and not just for any of its consequences, but one should not act viciously for the sake of friendship. 

So much thinking about ancient ethics misses this point, especially in the context of Aristotle's work, that I have worked on two essays to establish it in that context. "Wishing for Fortune, Choosing Activity" and "Aristotle on External Goods and Eudaimonia" try to make my case and clarify what is at issue in the dispute between Aristotle and the Stoics when they disagree about what things are good for human beings. 

If I can persuade you that Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics are Socratic eudaimonists, we would next need to consider two obvious questions about the view that they share. First, how much virtuous activity is required for eudaimonia? Aristotle seems to think that only a long time spent acting virtuously—a "complete life" of it—would count as eudaimonia, whereas the Stoics seem to think that a shorter stint would suffice. Why do these philosophers take contrasting stands on this question? Second, the Socratic eudaimonist's formula suggests that you act for the sake of eudaimonia by acting virtuously, and that's fine and dandy for anyone who is virtuous. But what does the formula say to those of us who are not virtuous? I have essays in progress for each of these two complications, one called "Some Greek Thoughts about Completion" and the other called "The Problem of Advising Fools."

Another set of questions concerns the consequentialist eudaimonists. 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. 

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 Eudaimonist Alternative 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 simple 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 explored two approaches to this question. First, in three essays, 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 "Western" philosophical traditions, 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.  

A second approach to the Greek understanding of philosophy focuses more directly on what the Greeks took wisdom to be and how they recommended pursuing it. This approach comes up under several headings above, and especially in "Plato's Socrates and his Conception of Philosophy" and "Socratic Methods" (see Socrates), which concerns Plato's attempts to define the philosophical life. But the approach finds an entirely different register in the later debate between Stoics and Academic skeptics, as the question of what the philosophical life is runs into doubts about whether it is possible to make any progress toward wisdom at all. I've been thinking about this as I work on two complementary essays, one a chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Stoicism and another an essay for a Festsschrift for Liz Asmis. Both concern the Stoic response to non-kataleptic impressions.   

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 and in part because I doubt I could write about the pleasure-seeking life at any length without moralizing. 

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.) 

But now 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. So I am 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 "usefulnesses" (chreiai). They were useful in conveying the "philosophical" or "Cynic" character of Antipater 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 (especially Socratic) 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 and with our similar "inner truths" of anecdotes told about other, non-Cynic philosophers. By sifting, we might locate what is distinctive about Cynic philosophy. 

In the SEP survey, I'll have more to say about what is distinctive about Cynic philosophy, but I will probably hew close to the scholarly consensus on these things, since that seems to me to fit the purposes of the SEP's readers. In my Cambridge Companion article on Cynic politics, though, I will push for a slightly different perspective. I'll argue that the Cynics were not innovative insofar as they were cosmopolitan, but were innovative insofar as they were anarchists. I mean, all the plausible interpretations attribute to the early Cynics a cosmopolitanism that is also plausibly attributed to some philosopher who predates the Cynics, but the way in which the Cynics live as cosmopolitans is nonetheless distinctive insofar as they reject civic institutions such as rulers and laws. They are not purely destructive anarchists, though: they cultivate some society, and thus aim at society without a state. 

This pair of essays will be completed in 2024, but the SEP article will require some revision every few years after that. So I plan to continue thinking about the Cynics.