My research examines how ancient Greek philosophers, especially Plato, understand varieties of human imperfection—epistemic, moral, political, and bodily—and how care and love shape appropriate responses to them. It develops across three connected programs: ignorance, vice, and illness in Plato; care, love, and friendship; and comparative Greek and early Chinese philosophy. Together, these programs investigate how human beings pursue individual and collective flourishing under non-ideal circumstances.

Ignorance, Vice, and Illness

My first research program centers on my book manuscript, In the Grip of Badness: Plato on Ignorance, Vice, and Illness. The book examines how Plato portrays and explains persistent forms of imperfection in individuals and political communities. I argue that Plato understands vice not merely as the absence of virtue but as a functional disorder with its own structure and causal history. His later dialogues deepen this account by examining how bodily constitution, environment, habituation, and political institutions contribute to psychic dysfunction. The manuscript is complete and undergoing final revision.

Two articles in Phronesis establish the project’s conceptual foundations. “Ignorance in Plato’s Protagoras: An Inquiry into Humanity’s Dark Side” (2022) analyzes ignorance as a structural disorder in which inferior elements dominate the soul. “The Anatomy of Ignorance in Plato’s Republic” (2026) examines amathia as a vice internal to reason itself: a network of misguided evaluative commitments rooted in an inflated assessment of one’s own understanding. Together, the articles illuminate the relationships among ignorance, arrogance, self-deception, vice, and the limits of rational persuasion.

My forthcoming Cambridge Element, Plato’s Medicinal Politics and Its Hippocratic Entwinement, extends this project to Plato’s engagement with Greek medicine. It argues that medical thinking supplies more than political metaphors: Plato adapts practices of diagnosis, prognosis, regimen, and treatment to analyze political conditions and explain the degeneration of the ideally ordered city.

Care, Love, and Friendship

My second research program investigates the roles of care, love, and friendship in individual and collective flourishing.

“The Virtue of Living Together in a City: Civic Moderation in Plato’s Republic” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2026) argues that civic moderation is the virtue of civic unity. Against interpretations that reduce it to agreement about who should rule or to the subordination of inferior desires, I show that it comprises mutually sustaining cognitive and affective dimensions: shared commitments concerning civic life together with dispositions of respect, trust, and concern. The friendship at its center is a form of koinōniaconstituted by shared goods, collaboration, coordination, and acknowledgment of citizens’ contributions to a common undertaking. An open-access version is available through Duke.

Related projects examine Socratic conversation as a practice of caring for oneself and others through shared inquiry, the psychological structure that unites prospective guardians and accomplished philosophers as philosophical people, and civic friendship in Aristotle’s ethical and political writings. Collectively, this work lays the foundation for a second monograph on care in ancient philosophy.

Comparative Greek and Chinese Philosophy

My third research program brings ancient Greek and early Chinese philosophy into dialogue through problem-centered comparison. Rather than assuming that concepts from different traditions are interchangeable, I reconstruct how particular texts formulate shared philosophical problems and use their convergences and differences to refine the categories through which we understand them.

Harmony is a central case. As co-director of Duke’s Harmony Humanities Lab, I have developed a collaborative project examining harmony as an ethical and political ideal across Greek and Chinese traditions. The guiding question is how harmony can unite differentiated agents, roles, and perspectives without collapsing into uniformity, mere agreement, or the absence of conflict. Early Chinese accounts of relationality and cultivated responsiveness broaden the terms in which political unity can be understood.

Other projects consider whether possessing more knowledge necessarily improves one’s life and how acknowledged cognitive limitations can support responsive, skillful action. Longer-term work will compare Greek and early Chinese medical traditions, asking which structures of medical explanation travel across traditions and which depend on distinctive physiological, ethical, and political commitments.