Ancient Philosophy

Northwestern has an active and friendly community of scholars working on Ancient Philosophy in Philosophy and Classics.

The department is excited about its new Ph.D. in Ancient Philosophy, which results in a Philosophy PhD and a certificate in Classics.

Core Faculty

David Ebrey

(Philosophy): ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

Richard Kraut

(Philosophy and Classics): moral and political philosophy in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

Sara Monoson

(Political Science and Classics): Plato’s political philosophy, ancient political theory, and their reception.

John Schafer

(Classics): Stoicism and Roman philosophy

John Wynne

(Classics): Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, especially Stoicism and skepticism

David Ebrey responding to Marco Zingano's paper at an Ancient Philosophy Workshop.

April 2010.

Additional Faculty

Faculty with a very strong secondary interest in ancient:

Ken Seeskin

(Philosophy): Socrates and Plato

Richard Kraut and David Ebrey at Charles Norman Todd's Ancient Philosophy Workshop.

May 2010.

Graduate Program

Typically, the department admits at least one graduate student a year interested in ancient philosophy and, with some frequency, other graduate students switch to this as their primary focus. Moreover, a number of other graduate students have a strong secondary interest in ancient philosophy and know ancient Greek or Latin. The following grad students work or are planning to work primarily on ancient philosophy: Cristina Carrillo Canas, Marcus Hines, Haewon Jeon, Oksana Maksymchuk, Hung Nguyen, and Daniel Tovar.

Graduate students can have a formal link to the classics department through the Classical Traditions Initiative.

Graduate students can take courses from University of Chicago and University of Illinois at Chicago through the Chicago Area Consortium in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy. They can also have faculty from these institutions on their dissertation committee.

For more information about the philosophy department’s graduate program, click here.

Daniel Tovar at Joe Karbowski's Ancient Philosophy Workshop.

April 2010.

Activities

In addition to graduate seminars, there are a number of other regular activities.

We have two seperate weekly reading groups, one Greek and the other Latin. Currently, we are reading Plato's Symposium and Boethius' Consolation.

We also hold ancient philosophy workshops where graduate students, faculty, and visitors present their work. The workshop schedule can be found here.

The Chicago Area Consortium in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy puts on a major conference every two years. Our last conference, Representation, Cognition, and Emotion, was on October 1-2, 2010. The consortium also meets monthly to discuss a faculty member's work in progress.

Northwestern holds a conference on the years when the Consortium does not. The last conference (May 14, 2010), Ordinary Virtue, focused on the ethics of non-ideal agents. The next conference (April 21-22, 2012) will be on the relation between theory and practice in Aristotle's natural philosophy.