‍ ‍ Parchi di Nervi, Genoa, Italy

I am Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Philosophy Department at Colgate University. I regularly teach ancient Greek philosophy and occasionally teach contemporary metaethics and epistemology.

My deepest academic interest is in Plato, whose dialogues I find endlessly profound and moving, but I have taken a long detour through early Stoic ethics, aiming to reconstruct Stoic ethical theory as it was developed and refined by Chrysippus in the third century BCE. I have written a number of papers that aim to make sense of Stoic moral-psychological views and the details of Stoic axiology.

More recently, I have co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Hellenistic Philosophy with Nate Powers, a project I began in the naive belief that it would take just three or four years to complete.

I am currently working on a book that reconstructs the ethics and moral psychology of the early Greek Stoics, focusing especially on questions of value and rational justification. On the other side of this project, I hope to return to Plato.

I am increasingly interested in the future of the humanities and humanistic learning in the age of AI and am working to develop an online community that brings together teachers and learners across humanistic disciplines.

I received my PhD in philosophy from Cornell University under the supervision of Terry Irwin. I have recently held visiting positions at the University of Michigan and Yale. Outside academia, I enjoy languages, historical novels, playing guitar, and lately, boxing.