My current research is on ancient epistemology, in particular skepticism, and philosophy of action. I pursue two book projects: Belief and Truth: A Socratic Reading of Plato, and Desiring the Good: A Socratic Reading of Aristotle. In Belief and Truth, I am concerned with two, arguably incompatible, intuitions: first, that every case of holding-to-be-true is a belief, and second, that beliefs are deficient judgments. I develop and defend both intuitions by placing the former in the philosophy of language and logic, and the latter in normative epistemology. In Desiring the Good, I argue that the standard Guise of the Good account of motivation - that, in being motivated, the agent judges something to be good - holds only for motivation that relates to what we want for our lives as a whole. Small-scale motivations are more diverse. Moreover, the agent is typically motivated by seeing an action as 'to-be-done,' not by judging the action or its outcome to be good.
My first book, Skepsis und Lebenspraxis (1998), offers an account of skeptical belief, language, and action. In my recent book, Law, Reason, and the Cosmic City (2008), I reconstruct the Stoic conception of reason, Stoic ethics, and Stoic cosmopolitanism. Stoic ethics is based on the claim that our interactions with others are structured by relationships. This claim interests me also as a line of objection to Kantian ethics, and with respect to contemporary discussions about friendship.
