Prof Sara Brill

I work on the psychology, politics, and ethics of Plato and Aristotle, as well as broader questions of embodiment, life, and power as points of intersection between ancient Greek philosophy and contemporary feminist, political, and critical theory. Early in my career, I was interested in the conceptual vocabulary by means of which Plato constructed his psychological investigations, particularly his use of medical concepts and eschatological myth. My recent work has centered on the multiple valences of the concept of zōē (life as such) in Aristotle’s thought - as a source of knowledge, as a form of being, as a regulative ideal, and as an object of desire - and the intellectual context within which his thinking developed, as part of a research programme designed to bring scholarship on animality and embodiment in Greek antiquity into conversation with contemporary efforts to query the political valence of life. Currently, I am working on a monograph on literary and visual representations of birth in Greek antiquity. This book is part of a larger project on the philosophical underpinnings of a cultural history of natality that asks what methodologies are necessary to study how the peoples of a particular time and a particular place took up the reality, provocation, and theorization of birth, and to consider why they did so in the way they did. I am also the editor of Epoché: a Journal in the History of Philosophy.