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Professor Anthony Price

Professor

BPhil, MA (Oxon)
Professor of Philosophy

Contact Details

Department of Philosophy
Birkbeck, University of London
Room 202
14 Gower Street
London
WC1E 6DP

Email: a.price@bbk.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)207 631 6380

Profile

  • Academic background:
    Educated at Winchester and Oxford in classics, history, and philosophy. Taught mostly at University of York, 1972-1995. Came to Birkbeck as lecturer in 1995; later promoted to reader, and professor

Research and Teaching

  • Introduction
    My interest in Greek philosophy (primarily but not only Plato and Aristotle) strives to do justice to the texts, but is always primarily philosophical in its goals, which are to increase our self-understanding as ethical agents through interpreting the texts in ways that attend to the details of their arguments and formulations, and attempt to make the best and most fruitful sense of these.
  • Teaching
    BA and MA courses in Plato and Aristotle; also in contemporary ethics.
  • Research Interests
    • Greek ethics and moral psychology
    • Contemporary ethics
  • Supervision
    Mostly MPhilStud, in Greek philosophy, or ethics; some PhD in ethics.

Publications

  • Books
    • Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, extended 1997).
    • Mental Conflict (London: Routledge, 1995, translation into Portuguese, Conflito Mental, Sao Paulo: Papirus, 1998).
    • Contextuality in Practical Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008).
    • Virtue and Reason in Plato and Aristotle. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011).
  • Journal Articles
    • ‘Doing Things Explicitly with Words’, Philosophical Studies 36 (1979), 345-57.
    • ‘Aristotle’s Ethical Holism’, Mind 89 (1980), 338-52.
    • ‘Loving Persons Platonically’, Phronesis 26 (1981), 25-34.
    • ‘Varieties of Objectivity and Values’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 83 (1982/83), 103-19.
    • ‘Aristotle’s Ethics’, Journal of Medical Ethics 11 (1985), 150-52.
    • ‘Doubts about Projectivism’, Philosophy 61 (1986), 215-28.
    • Commentary on R.J. Hankinson ‘Implications of Immortality’, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 6 (1990), 28-33.
    • ‘Martha Nussbaum’s Symposium’, Ancient Philosophy 11 (1991), 285-99.
    • ‘Aristotelian Perceptions’, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 12 (1996), 285-309.
    • Critical notice of J. Griffin Value Judgement, Philosophical Books 39 (1998), 9-17.
    • Critical notice of M. Pakaluk, Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics Books VIII & IX, Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001), 215-23.
    • ‘On the so-called Logic of Practical Inference’, in A. O’Hear (ed.), Modern Moral Philosophy, Philosophy Supplement 54 (2004), 119-40.
    • Obituary of R.M. Hare, Proceedings of the British Academy 124 (2004), 117-37.
    • ‘Was Aristotle a Particularist?’, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 21 (2005), 191-212.
    • ‘Against Requirements of Rationality’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 108 (2008), 157-76.
    • ‘Reasoning about Justice in Plato’s Republic’, in Festschrift for Gerasimos Santas, Philosophical Inquiry 30 (2008), 25-35; also printed in G. Anagnostopoulos (ed.), Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian Studies: Essays in Honour of Gerasimos Santas (Springer Verlag, 2011), 245-54.
    • ‘The Practical Syllogism in Aristotle: A New Interpretation’, Philosophiegeschichte und logische Analyse/Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy 11 (2008), 151-62.
    • ‘Egoism and Altruism’, Organon (Poland) 37 (2008), 71-9.
    • ‘Are Plato’s Soul-Parts Psychological Subjects?’, Ancient Philosophy 29 (2009), 1-15.
    • ‘Intuitions of Fittingness’, Common Knowledge 15 (2009), 348-64.
    • Critical notice of C. Natali (ed.), Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book VII (Symposium Aristotelicum), Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 93 (2011), 200-10.
    • ‘Eudaimonism and Egocentricity’, forthcoming in The Harvard Review of Philosophy 19 (Fall, 2012)
  • Volume Contributions
    • Reply to A.J. Ayer’s ‘What Must There Be?’, in B.Y. Khanbhai, R.S. Katz, R.A. Pineau (eds) Jowett Papers 1968-69 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970), 95-100.
    • ‘Plato and Freud’, in C. Gill (ed.) The Person and the Human Mind: Issues in Ancient and Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 247-70.
    • ‘Reason’s New Role in the Phaedrus’, in L. Rossetti (ed.) Understanding the Phaedrus, Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium Platonicum (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 1992), 237-9.
    • ‘Three Types of Projectivism’, in J. Hopkins & A. Savile (eds) Psychoanalysis, Mind and Art: Perspectives on Richard Wollheim (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 110-28.
    • ‘Wordsworth’s Ode on the Intimations of Immortality’, in A. Baldwin & S. Hutton (eds) Platonism and the English Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 217-28.
    • ‘Friendship (VIII und IX)’, in O. Höffe (ed.) Aristoteles: die Nikomachische Ethik (Berlin: akademie-Verlag, 1995), 229-51.
    • ‘Commentary on Kato’, in C. Rowe (ed.) Reading the Statesman, Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium Platonicum (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 1995), 173-4.
    • Articles on ‘Diotima’, ‘Love and Friendship’, ‘Phaedrus (1)’, in S. Hornblower & A. Spawforth (eds) The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edn (Oxford,  Clarendon Press, 1996), 485, 885-6, 1151 (revised version of the former forthcoming in 4th edn).
    • ‘Plato: Ethics and Politics’, in C.C.W. Taylor (ed.) Routledge History of Philosophy Volume 1: From the Beginning to Plato (London: Routledge, 1997), 394-424.
    • ‘Hare, Richard Mervyn’, in E. Craig (ed.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998), iv. 229-31.
    • ‘Friendship and Politics’, in C. Steel (ed.) The Legacy of Aristotle’s Political Thought (Brussels: Paleis der Academnen, 1999), 101-20; also in Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 61 (1999), 525-45.
    • ‘Ideology, Projection, and Cognition’, in E. Harcourt (ed.) Morality, Reflection, and Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 64-86.
    • ‘Plato, Zeno, and the Object of Love’, in M.C. Nussbaum & J. Sihvola (eds) The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 170-99.
    • ‘The Irreducibility of the Ethical in Plato and Aristotle’, in R. Heinaman (ed.) Plato and Aristotle’s Ethics (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 28-47.
    • ‘Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Will’, in T. Pink & M. Stone (eds) The Will and Human Action: From Antiquity to the Present Day (London: Routledge, 2003), 29-52.
    • ‘Were Zeno and Chrysippus at Odds in Analysing Emotion?’, in R. Salles (ed.) Metaphysics, Soul, and Ethics in Ancient Thought: themes from the work of Richard Sorabji (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 471-88.
    • ‘Aristotelian Virtue and Practical Judgement’, C. Gill (ed.) Virtue, Norms, and Objectivity: Issues in Ancient and Modern Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 257-78.
    • ‘Hare, Richard Mervyn’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (added 2005).
    • ‘Acrasia and Self-Control’, in R. Kraut (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 234-54.
    • ‘Particularism and Pleasure’, in M. Lance, M. Potrc & V. Strahovnik (eds) Challenging Moral Particularism (London: Routledge, 2008), 185-92.
    • ‘Aristotle’s Conception of Practical Thinking’, in C. Sandis (ed.), New Essays on the Explanation of Action (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 384-395.
    • ‘The Emotions in Plato and Aristotle’, in P. Goldie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010), 121-42.
    • ‘Aristotle on the Ends of Deliberation’, in M. Pakaluk & G. Pearson (eds), Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 135-58.
    • ‘Akrasia w Protagorasie’ [in Polish], in A. Pacewicz (ed.), Kolokwia Platońskie: Protagoras (Wydawca: Polskie Forum Filozoficzne, 2011), 189-212.
    • ‘Are Emotions Judgments of Value?’, forthcoming in Martha Nussbaum volume in the Library of Living Philosophers (Open Court).
    • ‘A Quietist Particularism’, forthcoming in Thinking About Reasons: Essays in Honour of Jonathan Dancy, edited by David Bakhurst, Brad Hooker & Margaret Little (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
    • ‘Projectivism’, forthcoming in International Encyclopedia of Ethics (internet).
    • ‘Aristotle on Virtue: A Response to Thomas Hurka’, forthcoming J. Peters (ed), Aristotelian Ethics in Contemporary Perspective (Routledge).

External Lectures

  • In the Department of Linguistics, University of York, in defence of J.L. Austin on speech acts, 1982; at the University of Kentucky titled ‘Plato and Freud’, 1989; at Shanxi University (China), four lectures on Plato and modern ethics, 1992; at the University of Trier titled ‘Morality and the Culture of the Virtues’, 1997; at the Belgian Royal Academy (Brussels) titled ‘Friendship and Politics’, 1998; at the Royal Institute of Philosophy (London) titled ‘On Criticizing Values’, 1998; at the Royal Institute of Philosophy (London) titled ‘Practical Inference’, 2002; at the European College of Liberal Arts (Berlin), two lectures on Plato and Aristotle on tragedy, 2006; at the University of Riyeka (Croatia) titled ‘Are Emotions Judgments of Value?’, 2007; at the European College of Liberal Arts (Berlin), one lecture on Aristotle’s Rhetoric on emotion, 2012.

Professional Membership

  • Aristotelian Society
  • International Plato Society

Highlight

  • I shall continue to publish on Plato and Aristotle; my next commission is to write a piece for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on my primary Oxford supervisor, R.M. Hare.

 

     

     

     

Professor Anthony Price

Professor Anthony Price

 
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