Dissertation- The World as It is and as It Commands: The Structures of Reality in Stoicism
Abstract: Most of the scholarship on the Stoic theory of lekta (“sayables”), incorporeal entities that underlie language and thought, focusses on axiōmata (assertibles/propositions), but imperative lekta are essential as well. I offer an account of sayables built from doxographical and critical sources, like Cicero, Plutarch, and Sextus Empiricus that explains the general features of sayables while incorporating imperatives into the structure of the world. Using contemporary theories of imperative semantics and structuralist theories in philosophy of mathematics to clarify and reconstruct their theory, I show how, through imperative sayables, the Stoic account of the world as a perfectly reasonable living being relates to their theories of human right action, cosmopolitan citizenship, and natural law.
Plato and Artificial Intelligence
My other main project incorporates concepts and approaches from Plato’s philosophy to address the novel philosophical problems raised by Artificial Intelligence. The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has prompted new questions about knowledge, expertise, and agency. Much of the current focus in philosophy of AI has been on questions of practical ethics, rather than on these more fundamental metaethical and metaphysical considerations. Approaching these issues though Plato gives us both particular areas of investigation, such as Plato’s criticism of orators and its parallels to problems with the outputs of LLMs, and a more general method for critically assessing and defining new capacities of these models.