Notes on Contributors
Gastón Javier Basile
is a Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Buenos Aires. Currently, he is a Senior Research Fellow at the Medici Archive Project in Florence. His latest research is on the genesis of Greek scientific discourse and the translation of scientific texts during the Italian Renaissance and has appeared in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, Arts et Savoirs, Medievalia et Humanistica, the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Dialogues d’Histoire Ancienne, and The Renaissance Quarterly. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (2022–2023), Harvard University (2021–2022), The Warburg Institute (2019), the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (2018), the University of Buenos Aires (2015–2017), and the University of Siena (2016, 2011). His forthcoming monograph explores the role of translation of Greek texts into Latin in the development of scientific knowledge in fifteenth-century Italy.
Sylvia Berryman
is Professor of Philosophy at The University of British Columbia, and the author of The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy (Cambridge 2009). In addition to her work on the impacts of ancient Greek sciences, especially mechanics, on philosophical ideas, she has more recently been working on Aristotelian virtue ethics and imperialism.
Dirk L. Couprie
is a retired scholar (University of Leiden). Doctoral dissertation at University of Amsterdam with a thesis on Anaximander. Current position: leader of a project on Presocratic Philosophy at the philosophical department of the faculty of philosophy and arts, University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. Research interests include Presocratic philosophy, especially Presocratic cosmology; also ancient cosmology in a broader perspective (ancient Egyptian, ancient Jewish, ancient Chinese).
Giovanni Fanfani
is a classical philologist who has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Copenhagen and at the Research Institute for the History of Technology and Science of Deutsches Museum, Munich. His research spans archaic and classical Greek literature, especially lyric poetry and Presocratic philosophy, around the interaction between textile technology and early Greek thought. Recent work (with Ellen Harlizius-Klück) explores the contribution of ancient weaving to the emergence of Greek mathematics and Plato’s distinction between pure and applied knowledge. He is co-editor of the volume Homo Textor. Weaving as Technical Mode of Existence (Mattering Press 2024) and The Imagery of Sound and the Sound of Imagery in Pindar (forthcoming in the series ‘Studi di Eikasmós Online’).
Andrew Gregory
is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London. He has published extensively on science in the ancient world, including books on Plato’s Philosophy of Science, Ancient Greek Cosmogony, Anaximander, The Presocratics and the Supernatural, and Early Greek Philosophies of Nature. He is currently working on a book on Leucippus and Democritus, re-examining some of the scientific, historical, and philosophical claims made about the early atomists.
Robert Hahn
is Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University, and is the author of five research books including Anaximander and the Architects; Archaeology and the Origins of Philosophy; and The Metaphysics of the Pythagorean Theorem. He has led 67 interdisciplinary, team-taught Study Abroad programs to Greece, to Greece and Turkey, and to Egypt. He has been honored by his university as The Outstanding Scholar of the College, The Outstanding Teacher of the College, and the Outstanding Educator in the University.
Ellen Harlizius-Klück
is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for the History of Technology and Science, Deutsches Museum, Munich. Trained as mathematician, artist, and philosopher, she explores the impact of ancient weaving technology on the development of science and culture. Recently she conducted A Study of Weaving as Technical Mode of Existence in the five-year project Penelope together with Alex McLean, Annapurna Mamidipudi, and Giovanni Fanfani (ERC-CoG-2015, GA Nr. 682711). Together with her team she recently edited the book Homo Textor: Weaving as (Technical) Mode of Existence and published a series of joint articles, including: “(Micro-)Performing Ancient Weaving in the PENELOPE Project”, in: Performance Research: On Microperformativity, 25/3 (2020).
Andrei Lebedev
received his Ph.D. from the University of St. Petersburg in 1980 and for many years has been senior research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Crete, where he taught from 1996 to 2018. He has been Visiting Associate Professor in Classics at Johns Hopkins University, a Perkins Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton University, and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. His main research interests include Early Greek Philosophy and Science, doxography, history of philosophical terms, typology of ancient philosophical systems, Aristotle and classical Greek ethics. Major publications include Fragmenty rannih grecheskih filosofov (The Fragments of the Early Greek Philosophers), 1989; Logos Geraklita: Rekonstrukciia mysli i slova. S novym kriticheskim izdaniem fragmentov (The Logos of Heraclitus: A Reconstruction of his Thought and Word) 2014. He has translated Aristotle’s De Caelo into Russian and contributed more than 200 entries on Greek philosophers and ancient philosophical terms to philosophical dictionaries and encyclopedias.
Geoffrey Lloyd
is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science at the University of Cambridge, where from 1989 to 2000 he was Master of Darwin College. His interests in ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy and science have increasingly led him into comparative studies drawing on social anthropology, evolutionary psychology, ethology, and cognitive science, as most recently in his Expanding Horizons in the History of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and his contributions to the workshops Science in the Forest, Science in the Past, published in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, e.g., 46.3, 213–425.
Nathasja Roggo-van Luijn
received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2022, with the thesis ‘The Epistemology of Artefact Comparisons in Early Greek Natural Philosophy and Medicine’. She is currently postdoctoral researcher at the Institut für Geschichte, Theorie und Ethik der Medizin at the University of Ulm (Germany). She published ‘The playful role of the girl in Empedocles’ B100’ in 2021 in Rhizomata. Her research interests include the use of analogies and literary figures of speech in philosophical thought, and ancient Graeco-Roman science and medicine. She has also co-edited a Dutch literary travel guide to ancient Rome (van Luijn, Oldenhave & Pieper (eds.), De vereeuwigde stad. Een literaire reisgids door het antieke Rome) with Amsterdam University Press.
Richard Seaford†
was a British classicist. He was Professor Emeritus of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. His work focused on ancient Greek culture, especially that of ancient Athens. They include Money and the Early Greek Mind (2004), Cosmology and the Polis (2012), Tragedy, Ritual and Money in Ancient Greece (2018), and The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India. A Historical Comparison (2020). He died in December 2023.
Harold Tarrant
studied at Cambridge and Durham Universities, but taught for nearly four decades at the University of Sydney and the University of Newcastle, Australia. Now retired, he remains Professor Emeritus at the University of Newcastle though living again in the UK. His many publications deal mainly with the Platonic tradition from Socrates until Olympiodorus.
Philip Thibodeau
studies early Greek scientists and the social and multicultural contexts in which their work evolved. His most recent work is a monograph on the timeline of these persons entitled The Chronology of the Early Greek Natural Philosophers. He is currently working on a study of the chronology of the poems of Homer and Hesiod which places them in the early sixth century BCE. His published works also include studies of ancient Greek and Roman agriculture, ancient theories of vision, Horace’s Odes, and Vergil’s great poem on farming, the Georgics. His expertise includes: early Greek cosmology; ancient chronology; ancient science; Vergil, Horace, and Augustan poetry; Latin pedagogy.
Bella Vivante
is Professor Emerita of Classics, University of Arizona. She received her Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford University; has held the Hennebach Distinguished Visiting Professor, Colorado School of Mines; was Director of the NEH Summer Institute, “New Perspectives on Classical Antiquity”; and leader of many student and adult trips to Greece and Turkey, including as Study Expert on Smithsonian Journeys trips to the ancient sites. Select publications: Daughters of Gaia: Women in the Ancient Mediterranean; as editor, Women’s Roles in Ancient Civilizations; a translation of Euripides’ Helen in Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides; and as scriptwriter and lead performer for Women, Marriage and Family in Ancient Greece, dvd.
William Wians
teaches at Boston College and is Professor Emeritus of philosophy at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts. He has taught at Boston University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Notre Dame, where he received his Ph.D. Recent publications include three edited collections: Logos and Muthos: Philosophical Essays in Greek Literature (SUNY Press, 2009), Logoi and Muthoi: Further Philosophical Essays in Greek Literature (SUNY Press, 2019), and Reading Aristotle: Argument and Exposition, co-edited with Ronald Polansky (Brill, 2017). His current work is concentrated in two areas: what it means to imitate Socrates, and Aristotle’s distinction between Second and First Philosophy.