Pushing the boundaries of knowledge: Prof. Vasilis Politis

Politis’ Trinity career started in 1990 when he arrived on a 5-year contract. The core focus of his ongoing research came to him around the year 2000 when he started working on Aporia (or puzzlement) in Plato and Aristotle. Before this, he notes, “I published a number of papers, but then did some research, and thought I had discovered a serious misunderstanding by the critics in this area. So, I started publishing on this, and my research career really took off with that research project.” In 2007-2008, Politis won a Government of Ireland Fellowship to continue this work, and the following year he received a one-year fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. This work led to the publication of his monograph The Structure of Enquiry in Plato’s Early Dialogues by Cambridge University Press in 2015.

His background in languages has played a vital role in his career. Moving as a young boy from Greece to Denmark, he is fluent in both Danish and Modern Greek. As a result, he still reads Kierkegaard in Danish. German has also been crucial in relation to his publications. “There has been quite a big response to this, because of my German interpretation of Plato. It is quite remarkable, because the Anglo-Saxon world doesn't read much German. It was a neglected area, until we did this translation.” He also reads French and Italian, saying that “the three languages that have been most important for me are English, German, and Ancient Greek. My real pleasure is to read philosophers, to try to get to the bottom of the language, and then to understand it as carefully as I can.”

Politis’ own office is located at the Trinity Plato Centre. He has been a key member of the centre throughout its twenty years, which is demonstrated in his role as director for over a decade. Operating out of the basement of Trinity’s 1937 Reading Room, the Trinity Plato Centre was founded by Politis’ colleague Prof. John Dillon. The Centre has welcomed several IRC Postdoctoral Fellows and many visiting scholars, a large number of which were invited to the Centre by Politis himself while conducting international research.

“We have quite an extensive library, and it's a place where we have been getting together on a regular basis, including meeting my own graduate students and postdocs. It’s a very creative space,” he observes. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the centre moved to running many of its events online, including its seminars, which means they have been able to attract more people. “These seminars are very much about studying text together and reading the original and various translations,” he explains, “and using that as a stepping stone to think philosophically about things. Not just reading the text, but using them as a sort of platform. The Plato Centre has been absolutely crucial to my own development. and of course, having such a formidable scholar and a wonderful colleague in John Dillon has made a huge difference. We have created a small community of like-minded scholars, without which my work woud have been quite lonely.”

Politis highlights the importance of community within and surrounding his research: “I think it's absolutely necessary for me, at least, and I think for most people it's kind of obvious. But it should be said that it's necessary to have people around you. That way, people can interact regularly, not just when going to a conference every couple of months. That's what we have at the Plato Centre. We just get together and read something, and then somebody has an idea. And this happens very regularly.” It’s important, he notes, both for the success of the work and also for one's mental health.

Politis discusses Trinity’s approach to teaching as one that has been very supportive to his career. When reading the college’s statutes, he was extremely impressed by the axiom that teaching staff should, as far as possible, teach within their research areas. It’s a “huge strength” of the university, he observes, that he has never been asked to teach outside his area of expertise. “I have offered a couple of times when we had a gap to fill, but it's quite a privilege to have been able to teach in my research area. And that is at all levels, we’ve had MPhil calls for the past several years, and I have supervised twenty PhD students.”

Day-to-day he takes time to conduct research whenever possible. “It partly depends on how much admin and teaching there is, but it's certainly important to me that I do a little bit of research every day. I need to have some ideas to keep mulling over in my mind.” He prefers to work from early in the morning, “so if my teaching isn't till the afternoon I can work for a couple of hours in in the morning before I go into college. I can't really work in the afternoon and I don't work well late at night.” This of course differs from person to person, but his own approach is to be holistic about each day as far as possible. “When I left Greece I was 7 years old,” he reflects. “I somehow turned very much to reading and studying. So even at a very young age where I had no philosophy, I used to be quite focused on things like reading and thinking. And, you know. I'm not saying it's necessarily a good thing, because it has its own price. But that's what life is. As we say in Greek, there's no escaping one's own character.”

While he may not be working on his original formative research project on Plato and Aristotle any more, he continues, “it’s still with me: it was that project that made me commit to many years of productivity. And I still think that what keeps me going is my work. I really enjoy it, and I wouldn't be able to exist without it.” Examining his research career, we can see how Politis pushes at the boundaries of knowledge by engaging in a holistic approach to research, one which looks beyond regular deadlines or schedules and encourages an element of unpredictability.

“It's difficult to give advice, but I would say, you should try to find something that you think is interesting and important, that would keep you going for a while. Don't just think in terms of the next six or twelve months, because then you will just be moving from one thing to another. So the advice would be, try to find something you think could be important. Of course you can't know that it's important. You are, in a way, taking a certain kind of risk. This is difficult in our day and age, because if you take a risk it may not work out. But I think that you can still publish more straightforward material while you're thinking of a larger project, so you can recover your risks in that way.”

- Article written by Dr Sarah Cullen