Project Team
Dr Anna Marmodoro
Project Director
Dr Marmodoro is a Fellow in Philosophy in Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford. She specializes in two research areas: metaphysics on the one hand, and ancient, late antiquity and medieval philosophy on the other. She has also strong research interest in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of religion. In metaphysics she is particularly interested in questions concerning fundamentality; composition and structure; the nature of properties, dispositions, relations; the metaphysics of substance; and causation. With her other hat on, she has worked on an eclectic collection of topics, in Anaxagoras, Aristotle, the Stoics, Gregory of Nyssa, Aquinas. Anna has published monographs, edited books and journal articles in all these areas. She currently directs a large-scale multidisciplinary research group funded by the European Reseach Council and the Templeton World Charity Foundation, with a combined research budget of over £2M. Her group investigates the nature of the fundamental building blocks of reality, with special interest in the hypothesis that they may be modeled as causal powers. Anna and her group also investigate how ancient thinkers in the Western world thought of the same set of questions.
Dr Brian Prince
Post-doctoral Fellow
Dr Prince holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rice University (2011), and a M.A. from the University of Chicago (1995). His dissertation, under the supervision of Don Morrison, explores the treatment of souls and motions in middle and late Plato. He has also worked on transmission patterns among the late antique commentators and on various issues in the Timaeus.
Dr David Yates
Post-doctoral Fellow
Dr Yates holds a PhD and MPhil in Philosophy from King’s College London, where, following a temporary lectureship at Sheffield, he was subsequently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and lecturer. He specialises in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, and his recent work focuses on the metaphysics of causation, in particular the causal roles of properties. Dr Yates has published papers on emergent downwards causation, dispositional essentialism and the causal exclusion problem for functionalists. He is currently conducting research on a range of issues, including: the distinction between powers and non-powers, the epistemological implications of quidditism, the status of geometric properties, and the prospects for a powers-based account of modality.
Dr Tamer Nawar
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Dr Nawar holds a PhD in ancient philosophy from the University of Cambridge, and joined the project team in October 2013 as a post-doctoral fellow in Post-Aristotelian philosophy. His dissertation: 'Plato, the Stoics, and Augustine on Knowledge', examined the conception of knowledge of said ancient philosophers, how the Stoics and Augustine resist sceptical attacks, and whether their arguments are any good. To date his research has focused primarily on ancient philosophy, epistemology, and several issues at the intersection between epistemology and metaphysics on the one hand and epistemology and ethics on the other. His current work focuses on causation, reduction, and emergence in Hellenistic metaphysics.
Dr Irini–Fotini Viltanioti
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Dr Viltanioti holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and a D. E. A. from the University of Brussels (Université Libre de Bruxelles). In 2014 she was appointed to one-year post-doctoral research fellowship in Oxford to work on the Power Structuralism in Ancient Ontologies project, while also being an honorary member of the F.R.S.-FNRS and a Research Associate of the project L’Antre des Nymphes de Porphyre directed by Tiziano Dorandi (Centre Jean Pépin, CNRS URP 76).
Irini’s doctoral dissertation is on theories of numbers in ancient Pythagoreanism and in Plato. During her graduate studies, she was the recipient of two scholarships of the A. S. Onassis Foundation (2005-2006 and 2006-2010). In 2010, Irini received the Van Buuren award; in 2011 she received a Wiener-Anspach Foundation scholarship, and a F.R.S.-FNRS post-doctoral research fellowship. From 2011 to 2014, she has been a Research Associate working on the Power Structuralism in Ancient Ontologies project with the support of the two above foundations.
In recent years, Irini has published in a variety of areas on ancient thought. Her monograph L’harmonie des Sirènes de pythagorisme ancien à Platon is forthcoming in August 2015 (Walter de Gruyter).
Dr Naoya Iwata
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Dr Iwata holds a PhD in ancient philosophy from the University of Cambridge, and joined the project team in January 2015. His PhD thesis is entitled, 'Hypothesis and the Good: Antecedents of Plato's Republic', which investigated Plato's bottom-up procedure for formulating a hypothesis in the Meno and the Phaedo, with the aim of understanding his theoretical grounds for establishing the Form of the Good as the unhypothetical first principle in the Republic. For the project, he explores the relationship between Hippocrates' medical theory and Plato's attention to the concept of power as a methodological tool for discovering the nature of things. For more information, see here.
Mr John Pemberton
Research Associate
John Pemberton is an Associate at the Centre for Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences at the LSE. His current research is focused on the nature of change, powers and causation. A prominent feature of this research is work in conjunction with Nancy Cartwright on nomological machines, i.e. arrangements of components and powers which give rise to characteristic change (power structures, one might say). Another aspect is an exploration of the interrelation between change and structure, where this work is informed by Aristotle’s account of form, process of change, and agent-patient powers.
Dr Giorgia Carta
Project Administrator
Giorgia holds a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Warwick and joined the project team as a part-time administrator in 2013.
Dori
Castillo Aranda
Project Administrator
Dori
holds BA (Hons) Business Administration & Management in the University of
Jaen, Spain and joined the project team as a
part-time administrator in 2015
