Faculty
Matthew Evans Associate Professor of Philosophy evansmatt@me.com | homepage
What draws me back to the ancient Greeks, time and time again, is their extraordinary capacity to give today’s philosophers an exciting old way to think about new things. The overarching aim of my research is to show how this can happen, and how grateful we should be when it does. Recently I have focused my attention on what I take to be some of Plato’s boldest and most striking arguments concerning the ethical status of pleasure and pain, the metaphysics of mind and value, the sustainability of materialism and relativism, and the role of thought in speech and action.
Select Publications
Articles
- “Lessons from Euthyphro 10a–11b.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 42 (2012): 1–38.
- “Plato on the Norms of Speech and Thought.” Phronesis 56 (2011): 322–49.
- “A Partisan’s Guide to Socratic Intellectualism.” In S. Tenenbaum (eds.), Desire, Practical Reason, and the Good, 6–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
- “Plato on the Possibility of Hedonic Mistakes.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 35 (2008), 89–124.
- “Plato’s Rejection of Thoughtless and Pleasureless Lives.” Phronesis 52 (2007), 337–63.
- “Plato’s Anti-Hedonism.” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 22 (2007), 121–45.
- “Plato and the Meaning of Pain.” Apeiron 40 (2007), 71–94.
- “Can Epicureans Be Friends?” Ancient Philosophy 24 (2004), 407–24.
