I am currently working on central and important texts of Plato: the Republic, the Theaetetus, the Meno, the Sophist. I am developing ideas about what Plato was trying to achieve, his relation to the Socrates character, and the methodology of the dialogues, to show that his approach to things in this world, and to philosophy, was quite different from what people have often supposed it to be. I hope to show that he was not opposed to the use of pictures, images and material things—rather his method of doing philosophy makes constant use of them as icons of what we need to understand. This has ramifications across a wide range of classic Platonic theses in epistemology and metaphysics, and suggests that for Plato knowledge was not propositional (and that he never changed to thinking that knowledge was of propositions, and that he was right in that). This work includes some investigation of why he always shows the quest for definitions as a failure.

This work is currently funded by the AHRC (a research fellowship for Autumn 2011) and will lead to a book to be published by Oxford University Press.

Alongside my current work on Plato, I maintain a longstanding interest in Early Greek Philosophy (that is Presocratic philosophy from Thales to the Sophists) which was the subject of my first book. My work on Empedocles is particularly widely discussed, especially for the suggestion that Empedocles wrote just one poem, and the way in which the cosmic and demonic cycles are to be integrated. My initial work to prove that this was required antedated by ten years the identification of the Strasbourg papyrus (which many have taken as confirmation of the hypothesis, though actually it is much less secure than the evidence available from the sources I was using). In more recent work I have been challenging the traditional assumption that thinkers after Parmenides were aware of Parmenides and responding to him, and questioning the relation of Heraclitus and Parmenides. I have also done some work on mathematics in the early Pythagorean period, and I shall be undertaking research on Pythagorean political thought in the Spring 2012. My current interests in Plato also include some attention to his thoughts on geometry and the exact sciences.

My earlier work on Plato includes attention to the place of love in Plato's thought (see Eros Unveiled and some other articles), and his cosmology. I regularly return to these issues. I have work in progress on the Noble Lie and the Myth of the Metals.

Much of my work on Aristotle has been around issues of mind, soul and imagination, some of it related to my work on animal minds (in Dumb Beasts and Dead Philosophers). I have worked on the De anima and De sensu, Ethics, Metaphysics and Physics. I am interested in Aristotle's work on perception, memory, self awareness, teleology, animal minds, the scala naturae and self-love (among other things). I have published recently on friendship and self-knowledge.

In the philosophy of late antiquity I range widely in Middle Platonism, Neoplatonism, and early Christian thought. In the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca I have focused primarily on the Alexandrian Christian Neoplatonist John Philoponus. I have written on Clement of Alexandria for the Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, and have a recent paper due for publication in Studia Patristica, on the Arian heresy. I am interested in developing a project on the nature of belief in Christianity and the relation of belief to erotic love and attention.

In history of modern philosophy I have explored how the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth uses Presocratic philosophy in The True Intellectual History of the Universe. As mentioned above, I have an occasional interest in the history of science and mathematics.

In contemporary philosophy I am interested in recent work in epistemology, the concept of truth, rule-following and ethical dilemmas, various issues in metaphysics including the notion of 'matter' and the location or usefulness of 'values', and in the role of the imagination and literary sensitivity in ethics. I have some plans for work on parts of Wittgenstein's On Certainty, and I have explored the relation between Wittgenstein's opposition to essentialism and Plato's.
 

"Plato on Knowledge and Truth." I am currently engaged in work on the idea that Plato's concept of knowledge and the related concept of truth do not map well onto the concerns of modern epistemology since Russell and Wittgenstein, and especially with the idea of propositional attitudes. The focus in on a range of dialogues including Meno, Republic Theaetetus,and Sophist. The aim is to show how sensitivity to Plato's own conceptual map will make those dialogues speak about something quite other than what they are usually taken to be about, and can assist in destabilising some modern preconceptions about propositional attitudes and propositional knowledge. This work has been funded by the AHRC (Research Fellowship, 2011) and the Leverhulme Trust (Research Fellowship 2007-9).

I have been a contributor to the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle project, in which I am responsible for the English translation, introduction and notes for two volumes of Philoponus (Commentary on Physics I).

At UEA I am involved in these research groups: The Wittgenstein Workshop; The Philosophy and the Arts Group; Ancient Philosophy; Ethical, Social and Political Philosophy; Philosophy of Religion.