Jake is a 4th year Ph.D. candidate with research interests in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy. Jake recently defended his proposal for a dissertation project on the Platonic Alcibiades I. This project's animating questions focus on the dialogue's exploration of self-knowledge: What constitutes self-knowledge? How is self-knowledge attained? What are the ethical benefits of self-knowledge? A general proposition of this dissertation project is that Alcibiades I raises and develops questions that address core topics in Plato's philosophy and warrants sustained philosophical reflection.
While a graduate student at Columbia, Jake has done research on a range of topics in ancient ethics and epistemology, in particular Plato's Meno and Phaedo, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, as well as the Sophists Protagoras and Gorgias. He has enjoyed teaching intensive elementary Greek and working as a teaching assistant for courses on early Greek Stoicism, the history of Ancient Philosophy (with a focus specifically on the Eleatics, the Atomists, Ionian thinkers, Plato, Aristotle, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism), and Greek lyric poetry.