Research

Published or forthcoming:

• “The notion of continuity from the Presocratics to Aristotle”,  
        in: The History of Continuity, ed. by Steward Shapiro, Oxford: OUP, forthcoming 2019.
• “Platonic Reception – Atomism and the atomists in Plato's Timaeus”,  
        in: The Reception of Presocratic Natural Philosophy in Later Classical Thought, ed. by Chelsea Harry and Justin Habash, Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2018.
• “Sufficient Reason in the Phaedo and its Presocratic antecedents”,  
        in: Plato’s Phaedo. Selected Papers from the Eleventh Symposium Platonicum, ed. by Gabriele Cornelli, Francisco Bravo, and Tom Robinson,
        International Plato Studies, St. Augustin: Academia Verlag, forthcoming 2018.
• “The notion of continuity in Parmenides”,  
        in: Philosophical Inquiry 42 (3-4), forthcoming 2018.
• “Space in Ancient Times: From the Presocratics to Aristotle”,  
        in: Space, Oxford Philosophical Concepts, ed. Andrew Janiak, forthcoming 2018.
• Revision of Donald Zeyl’s article on Plato’s Timaeus on the Stanford Encyclopedia for Philosophy, winter 2017  
        (https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/plato-timaeus/).
• “Aristotle’s Measurement Dilemma”,  
        in: Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 52, pp. 255-299, summer 2017.
• “The unity of temporal experience”,  
        in: The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Temporal Experience, ed. by Ian Phillips, London and New York, spring 2017.
• “Von der Bewegung himmlischer zu der irdischer Körper - Die wissenschaftliche Erfassung physischer Bewegung in der griechischen Antike“,  
        in: Körperkonzepte und körperliche Existenz in der antiken Philosophie und Literatur, ed. by Thomas Buchheim, Nora Wachsmann, and
        David Meißner, Hamburg: Meiner, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, Sonderheft 13, 2016.
• “Time is double the trouble – Zeno’s Moving Rows”,  
        in: Ancient Philosophy 35, 2015.
•   Review of John Palmer, Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy , Classical World 107.3 , 2014.  
• “Contingency and Necessity: Human agency in Musil’s The Man without Qualities”,  
        in: The Monist 97.1, January 2014.
• “The Eleusinian Mysteries in Pre-platonic Thought. Metaphor, Practise and Imagery for Plato’s Symposium”,  
        in: “Greek Religion, Philosophy and Salvation”, ed. Vishwa Adluri, Berlin, 2013.
•   Review of Patricia Curd and Daniel Graham (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy , Ancient Philosophy 33 (2013).  
• “A Likely Account of Necessity, Plato’s Receptacle as a Physical and Metaphysical Basis of Space”,  
        in: Journal of the History of Philosophy , April 2012.
• “Parmenides’ System – the Logical Origins of his Monism”,  
        in: Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 2009/2010, Leiden/Boston 2011.
        Parmenides paper
• “A time for learning and for counting – Egyptians, Greeks and empirical processes in Plato’s Timaeus”,  
        in: “One Book, the Whole Universe: Plato’s Timaeus Today”, Proceedings of the Conference “Plato’s Timaeus Today”
        at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, September 13-16, 2007, Las Vegas 2010.
        Time in the Timaeus (Penultimate draft)
• Co-editor (with Richard Mohr) of “One Book, the Whole Universe: Plato’s Timaeus Today”,  
        Proceedings of the Conference “Plato’s Timaeus Today”
        at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, September 13-16, 2007, Las Vegas 2010.
• Review of Christopher Schields, Aristotle, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, July 2008:  
        http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23647-aristotle
• Review of Michael Bordt, Platons Theologie, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, July 2007:  
        http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2007/2007-07-42.html
• Review of H-G. Nesselrath (Übersetzung und Kommentar), Platon. Kritias, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, January 2007:  
        http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2007/2007-01-43.html
• Review of Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood, Metapsychology Online, August 2006:  
        http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=3244

Work in Progress:

• “Natural Philosophy in Ancient Greece”, book manuscript.
• “Ancient Notions of time from Homer to Plato”, sketch for a monograph.
• “The Labours of Zeno – a Supertask?”
• “Planetary motions – a guide through human history? Plato’s astronomy and philosophy of history in the Timaeus”.
• “Plato’s Forms in the language of the Eleusinian Mysteries”.
• “Reconstructing Zeno’s Fourth Paradox of Motion”
• “Aristotle’s Notion of Measurement”.
• “What is doing the explaining? An atomistic idea”.
• “The conceptual basis for motion and change in Greek atomism”.

Research Statement:

The main focus of my research to date has been the philosophical process through which central concepts of metaphysics and natural philosophy, such as time or speed, arise in Greek antiquity. By showing that such concepts were originally spelt out in ways significantly different from the way they are today, I aim to make us aware both of the rich conceptual basis we often take for granted in such a way as to have difficulty imagining alternatives, as well as to sketch out possible alternative understandings. On the one hand, my concern is to show that and how such notions result from a long process of conceptual development. This is the focus of my first book, on the development of ancient natural philosophy. On the other hand, my concern is to show what may have been lost in the course of such development. This is the focus of my projected second book.
      The first book, Natural Philosophy in Ancient Greece, concerns the history of the establishment of natural philosophy as a proper scientific endeavor in philosophers from Parmenides to Aristotle. The modern understanding of time and space as related in the notion of motion (understanding motion as a distance traveled in a certain period of time) is not just a given. The conceptualization of motion as such a complex magnitude depended on logical, ontological, and methodological developments, as well as on the integration of important mathematical notions into philosophical discussion. By tracing the development of this conceptualization, I show how antiquity prepared the path for the conception of motion we have today.
      In my first book, time is largely a supporting actor, as a continuous magnitude used for the measurement of motion. In my planned second book, Ancient Notions of Time from Homer to Plato, it is the main protagonist. The book will show how the understanding of time changed dramatically in the thought of writers at the very beginning of the Western tradition. Early Greek literature – philosophical and non-philosophical – offers an unusually rich collection of philosophically interesting temporal structures, many of which are of special value in enabling us to identify and understand a wide range of subjective experiences of time. In the book I will first attempt to excavate this diverse array of temporal notions and their explanatory power for everyday temporal experiences. Second, I will show how certain demands from historians and philosophers led, in the end, to the formation of a unified notion of time.
      My papers’ main contributions to scholarship fall into six main areas:
      (1) The philosophy of the Eleatics (in particular Parmenides and Zeno):
      “Parmenides’ system” explores the conceptual basis for Parmenides’ monism and relates to the first chapter of my first book. Two connected papers (“Zeno’s Moving Rows” and “Reconstructing Zeno’s Fourth Paradox of Motion”) focus on the most neglected and ill-regarded of Zeno’s famous paradoxes of motion, offering both a new reconstruction of the paradox that shows it to be of genuine philosophical interest and proposing to establish, for the first time, a clear and unambiguous text of the paradox.
      (2) Plato’s Timaeus:
      “Planetary motions – a guide through human history?” offers a solution to the puzzle of why the work combines cosmology with a fictional cultural history (the tale of Atlantis). “A time for learning and for counting” explores the role of time in grounding the rationality of empirical processes. “A likely account of Necessity” argues that the receptacle of the Timaeus provides a metaphysical basis for the development of geometrical and physical space without itself being space.
      (3) Plato’s Symposium :
     In two papers (“The Eleusinian Mysteries in Pre-Platonic Thought” and “Plato’s Forms in the language of the Eleusinian Mysteries”), using the evidence of the dialogue, but also evidence from material culture, archaeological remains and pre-Platonic literature, I argue that, in the Symposium, Plato uses salient features of the Eleusinian Mysteries as a vehicle for introducing his transcendent metaphysics and his vision of the ascent to the Form of Beauty.
      (4) Aesthetics:
      I am mainly interested in the question how notions and concepts that are crucial for core areas of philosophy (like necessity, contingency, or time) are developed in literature and the fine arts. In “Contingency and Necessity: Human agency in Musil’s The Man without Qualities” I investigate how the genre of the novel allows for a concrete understanding of the problem of how to act in the face of all-encompassing contingency and for showing the consequences of viewing even the relationship one has to one’s own self as contingent. “Temporality and Genre in Early Greek Literature” investigates how different notions of time develop in close relationship to and sometimes even depending on different genres, in epic, lyric, and drama.
      (5) Developments in ancient natural philosophy:
      The paper “Von der Bewegung himmlischer zu der irdischer Körper - Die wissenschaftliche Erfassung physischer Bewegung in der griechischen Antike” explores why scientific enquiry of motion in ancient Greece starts as astronomy, as the investigation of the motions of heavenly bodies, and only with Aristotle gets to a detailed investigation also of the motions of earthly objects, in Aristotle's Physics . In “Space in Ancient Times: From the very beginning to Aristotle” I give a systematic account of the development of spatial thinking from the first Greek texts dealing with spatial notions to Aristotle’s Physics and De Caelo . “Aristotle’s Measurement Dilemma” argues that, in his Physics , Aristotle uses a very powerful notion of measurement against Zeno, but that for mathematical and metaphysical reasons he in fact defines the concept of measurement in a much weaker way.
      (6) Early Greek and contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of science:
      I have combined my work on Early Greek thinking with discussions in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of science in three papers: “The Labours of Zeno — a Supertask?” ques-tions the common assumption that Zeno’s dichotomy paradox gave birth to the modern so-called supertask debate in contemporary philosophy of science and shows in how far comparing supertaks with Zeno’s original paradox helps to make explicit the pre-conditions on which the supertask debate rests. “The unity of temporal experience” shows that a unified temporal framework which allows for situating all events, pro-cesses, and happenings is lacking in the very beginning of Western thinking and what effect this lack has on the quality of temporal experiences – how different temporal experiences are thus seen as experiences of quite different kind. “What is doing the explaining? An atomistic idea”, finally, tries to show to what extent the notion of met-aphysical explanation or grounding in contemporary metaphysical debates is based on Presocratic developments.
     

     

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