Notes on Contributors
Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides
is Associate Professor at the Department of History and Archaeology, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She works on ancient leadership legacies, political and intellectual, and the role of ritual in shaping key conceptual metaphors about legitimate leaders. She has published on the role of regeneration narratives in managing political crises during the Hellenistic and Augustan periods. She also works on metaphors about philosophical inspiration in Plato and their reception by Christian authors from the time of the early Church to the Quattrocento. Her research has been funded by the Australian Research Council and more recently by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.
Cesare Simone Astorino
graduated from the University of Milan with a thesis supervised by Prof. Franco Trabattoni, focused on the ways Plato presents his main metaphysical ideas and the reasons behind these stylistic choices. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pavia (Northwestern Italian Philosophy Convention, fino, supervisor: Prof. Franco Ferrari). His dissertation delves into Platoâs epistemology, aiming to establish a constructive role for sensible bodies by highlighting their nature as faithful images of the forms and their description as cult statues. He has spent research stays first at Trier Universität and then at the Cambridge Faculty of Classics.
Joseph Bjelde
received his Ph.D. from uc Berkeley in 2012 and has since 2013 been Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. He works primarily on epistemology in ancient Greek philosophy, and is especially interested in the epistemic and practical significance of dialectic and teaching.
Mauro Bonazzi
is Professor of History of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Bologna since 2023. Before he taught at the University of Milan and at Utrecht University. He also held teaching positions at Paris, Lille, Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand and Leuven. He is a specialist of the sophists, Plato and the Platonist tradition. His recent publications include The Sophists (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Platonism. A Concise History from the Early Academy to Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2023). For the Italian publisher Einaudi he translated and commented the Meno and the Phaedrus. He is currently working to a new commented translation of Platoâs Republic.
Elisabetta Cattanei
is Full Professor of History of Ancient Philosophy at the Catholic University in Milan, Italy. After graduating (1988) and getting a Ph.D. in Philosophy (1993) at the Catholic University in Milan, she did her research at the Universität Tübingen (ws 1993/94-ss 1995) and a post-Doc program (1996/97â98/99) in the field of History of Ancient Mathematics (Regensburg-Paris). In 1999 she became Research Professor at the University of Cagliari (Italy) where she worked from 2006 to 2015 as Associate Professor, and from 2016 until 2018 as Full Professor of History of Ancient Philosophy. From October 2018 until 2022, she was Full Professor of History of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Genoa, Italy. In the last 15 years she has been directing âlocal unitsâ of three different National Research Projects (prin) about Aristotle and Aristoteleanism. She is Vice President (2025â28) and Next President (2028â31) of the International Plato Society (ips) and former president of the Italian Society of History of Ancient Philosophy (sisfa â Società Italiana di Storia della Filosofia Antica). She takes part to the scientific and editorial committees of several series and reviews pertaining ancient philosophy and science. Her publications â in national and international context â are focused on the relations between mathematics and philosophy in the Antiquity, with special regard to Plato, Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias and Proclus.
Giulia Cervato
is a Ph.D. student at the University of Padua. She previously studied at Alma Mater Studiorum â University of Bologna and Université Catholique de Louvain and attended several conferences both on a national and an international level. Her research interests span aesthetics and hermeneutics in Platonism and Neoplatonism (with particular reference to Hermias of Alexandriaâs Commentary on the Phaedrus) and revolve around the tension between philosophical thinking and poetic inspiration, mimesis, and philosophy of image. Moreover, she examines the reception of Platonism in contemporary philosophy, especially concerning iconography and aniconism, and how these ideas intersect with contemporary Jewish philosophical traditions, with particular reference to Emmanuel Levinasâ thought.
Shane Fair
is an independent scholar and a recent Ph.D. graduate of the University of Ottawa (2021). His doctoral dissertation examined the role of wonder (θαῦμα, Î¸Î±Ï Î¼Î¬Î¶ÎµÎ¹Î½) in Platoâs dialogues. The thesis sought to distinguish two distinct-but-related types of philosophical wonder in Plato (aporetic and contemplative wonder), which both shed light on what Plato may have meant by his claim that âwonder is the pathos of the philosopherâ (Tht. 155d2â4). His research interests lie predominantly in examining the cross sections between Greek philosophy and other contemporary cultural and scientific practices (e.g. literature/poetry, medicine, and geometry); in particular, how Greek philosophy is infused with, and in some sense can only be understood in light of these practices.
Andy German
is a faculty member and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Ben-Gurion University, in Israel. His research and teaching focus on Plato and Aristotle, as well as on the German philosophical tradition of the 19th and early 20th Century â principally, Hegel. He was co-editor of the volume of essays titled Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and has published on the Greeks and the Germans in various journals such as the Review of Metaphysics, the British Journal of the History of Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy, and the International Philosophical Quarterly. His current project centers on the Aristotelian account of the relation between physis and logos and how it has been assimilated and transformed in the thought of Rousseau, Kant and Hegel.
Refik Güremen
is Associate Professor at the Middle East Technical University (metu). His work in ancient philosophy appeared in journals such as the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, Polis, Methexis, and the International Journal for the Study of Skepticism. He co-edited (with P.-M. Morel and J. Hammerstaedt) Diogenes of Oinoanda. Epicureanism and Philosophical Debates (Leuven University Press, 2017) and Aristote. Lâanimal politique (Publications de la Sorbonne, 2017, with A. Jaulin).
Victoria Rowe Holbrook
is a Senior Research Fellow at the Orient Institute Istanbul. She is a graduate of Harvard and Princeton and a member of the Society of Fellows and the American Philosophical Society. She has taught at Columbia, Ohio State, Bosphorus, Koç, Bilkent and Istanbul Bilgi universities. She is the author of The Unreadable Shores of Love: Turkish Modernity and Mystic Romance, translated into Turkish as AÅkın Okunmaz Kıyıları: Türk Modernitesi ve Mistik Romans; writings bridging literary, philosophical, and religious thought; and translations from Turkish and Persian, including The White Castle by Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk; The New Cultural Climate in Turkey: Living in a Shop Window by Nurdan Gürbilek; the Ottoman Turkish philosophical verse romance Beauty and Love by Galip; Listen: Commentary on the Spiritual Couplets of Mevlana Rumi by Kenan Rifai; and O Humankind: Surah Ya-Sin, a collection of Quranic commentary spanning a thousand years, compiled by Cemalnur Sargut. She is now working on a book about Platonism in the rest of the world.
Béatrice Lienemann
is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Université de Fribourg, in Switzerland. Her main research interests are ancient philosophy (especially metaphysics, epistemology and ethics) and their relations to the modern debates of practical and theoretical philosophy.
Abida Malik
is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Business and Vocational Education at Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. Her area of specialization is in ancient philosophy, contemporary epistemology, and virtue theory. She did her Ph.D. at the University of Bonn, Germany (with a research stay at Universidad Panamericana in Mexico City). Her dissertation Seelen im Wandel. Eine Studie zum Charakterbegriff bei Platon (Verlag Karl Alber, 2020) is the first comprehensive study on Platoâs concept of character. The book analyses Platoâs views of the evolvement of personality traits, explores the possibility of character change for adults, and looks at the educational and political implications of Platoâs views on character. In contemporary epistemology, Abida Malik focuses particularly on the concept of tacit knowledge, on which she published the papers âTacit Knowing: What it is and Why it Mattersâ (Episteme, 2023) and âCan Tacit Know-How be Acquired via Testimony?â (Grazer Philosophische Studien, 2023). Currently, she is developing a new project on epistemic environments in educational settings. This project seeks to describe current epistemic environments at educational institutions with the aim to develop measures for improving and enhancing these environments. In this study, she combines measures for environment transformation with a virtue epistemological approach to education.
Damien Storey
is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Koç University, Istanbul. He works in ancient philosophy and has interests in contemporary ethical and political philosophy. His research explores questions in Platoâs ethics, psychology, and epistemology, and in particular Platoâs views on the nature of belief and perception and how these relate to non-rational cognition. He is currently working on the images of the Sun, Line, and Cave in Platoâs Republic.
Marco Picciafuochi
obtained his masterâs degree in 2021 from the University of Roma Tre â Tor Vergata and the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, under the supervision of Francesco Aronadio and Johannes Hübner, with a thesis on the conceptual system underlying Platoâs use of figurative language in the Gorgias. In 2023 he spent six months at Durham University as a visiting research student, under the supervision of Phillip S. Horky. He is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Roma Tre â Tor Vergata, working on Platoâs philosophical use of images in the Republic, under the supervision of Francesco Aronadio. His research interests include ancient philosophy, Platoâs writing style in relation to his epistemology, and the use of methods from cognitive linguistics and lexicology to study ancient texts.
Hikmet Unlu
is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hacettepe University, Turkey. His research focuses primarily on the intersection of ancient Greek philosophy and classical phenomenology.