Spotlight Series

What is your current area of research?

I have been working especially on Plato for a very long time, and not so long ago I published a book and a number of articles on Plato. Now I am looking for a new project, but I haven’t quite found one yet. I have just given a fourth-year seminar on Plato and the Care for the Soul, which the students liked a lot, so that is an option for the next project. At the moment I am writing a paper, for an upcoming conference, on Plotinus on freedom and the relation to Plato, and I realize that I really enjoy working on Plotinus. Thankfully I will be on sabbatical next term, and I want to use this opportunity, for which I am genuinely grateful, to find a begin working on a new project, as well as, all going well, writing some papers.

What question or challenge were you setting out to address when you started this work?

As I am getting older, I realize more and more that one thing I especially enjoy is to read such philosophers as Plato and Plotinus, but also Nietzsche, very closely and without too much attention to secondary literature, and to use this discipline to develop my own thoughts. This is what, quite recently and suddenly, made me enthusiastic about the topic of the care of the soul in Plato, for it was in reading the Phaedo in this way that I became struck by the significance, moral and spiritual and existential, of this topic.

Share a turning point or defining moment in your work as a philosophical researcher?

When I came to Trinity in 1992 I worked on various things, in Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Moral Philosophy, and I published reasonably well but not substantially. I did not have a research topic, and a couple of things I tried out came to nothing. This all changed around 2000 when I struck what turned out to be a rich vein. For I discovered, as I thought and as proved correct, that what critics thought about aporia in Plato was significantly wrong, and that the place of aporia in Aristotle had not been sufficiently or properly examined. This gave my research impetus, focus and substance, which kept me going with some passion and enthusiasm for many years. Alas, I have now, at long last, grown tired of this topic and I am yet to find a new and comparably productive one.

Briefly, what excites you about your research?

I think one thing that excites me is the mental discipline and the striving to understand, also by working through the Greek, some very difficult but equally rewarding texts. I also enjoy very much working in this way, and engaging in very slow and intense readings, with other people. The truth is that I need this discipline, and that when I get away from it for whatever reason, I tend to get irritable or even downcast, as if my self had dispersed and I had become unable to focus on anything, not just philosophy. I like to think that everything else, be it academic successes or failures, are spinoffs and effects of this mental discipline, but I confess that I have been conventionally ambitious and that this has not always done me good.

What do you like to do when you aren`t working?

Listen to music is the main thing. I listen to all sorts of classical music and tend to listen to the same piece, such as Shostakovich’ Violin Concerto or Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, endless times before the next piece takes over for another endless times. I used to read a lot of literature, but I don’t read that much any longer. I am not sure why. Perhaps part of the reason is that few novels are as richly dense and worth reading very carefully, in the way Proust is, as the philosophy I am reading. That reminds me: I should go back to some poetry and even look for poetry I do not know.

What are you currently reading?

I have been reading for the past weeks Plotinus’ Ennead VI. 8, in the close way I have been indicating. Plotinus’ Greek is often a real challenge, and at times I realize that it is only when reading it with others, which a group of us have been doing for some time now on Friday mornings, that we get to the bottom of it; though sometimes even this effort fails. Plotinus is here putting forward some very curious and fascinating views about freedom, such as his view that freedom is a feature of our internal self and not of our external actions, and that the free person must be able to make and choose herself or himself. 

Do you have a favourite movie?

Yes, Bille August’s Festen (‘The Celebration’). I cannot get enough of it, though my housemate forbids me watching it too often since, as he says, it excites me too much.

Is there a work of art that inspires you?

I used to go to galleries quite a lot, but I have come to recognize that I am much more inspired by music. This summer I spent some hours in the Athens National Gallery, and it suddenly struck me, as I was looking at some very recent abstract pictures by to me unknown Greek artists, that I care for pictures only (to use a hyperbole) when they are thoroughly abstract. Sean Skully would be a home-grown example. 

What would people be surprised to find out about you?

I have written a novel, called Heart of Dublin, some years ago, though I leave it to you to guess what it is about. I still think it reads well and that the writing is distinctive, but I am glad I didn’t publish it for it is far too raw and in-your-face to admit public consumption.

March 2024