Eric SandayProfessor

PhD Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, 2003

MA Philosophy, Fordham University, 1996

BA Physics, University of Physics, 1991

My research and teaching are organized around a shared question: what does it mean to give an account? In ancient Greek philosophy, giving an account is not simply explaining what one already thinks. It is the work of becoming answerable — to reasons, to texts, to others, to civic life, and to the parts of experience that resist conceptual mastery.

Much of my work focuses on Plato, especially the late dialogues, where philosophical inquiry tests its own starting points. In my book, A Study of Dialectic in Plato’s Parmenides, I argue that the dialogue’s difficult hypotheses are not merely puzzles about abstract formal arguments, but exercises in philosophical thinking. The Parmenides teaches readers to hear a name or claim as an open question whose meaning must be recovered through inquiry rather than being stipulated in advance. That project continues in my work on the Statesman, Philebus, Laws, and Timaeus, where I examine how dialectic, law, pleasure, measure, political community, embodiment, and nature reveal the limits of any completed account.

A central theme of my research is that every account leaves something out. This remainder is not simply a failure of thought. In Plato, this failure is often the pressure that keeps inquiry alive and prevents philosophy, politics, or education from hardening into dogma. My current book project, The Counter-Logic of Life in Plato’s Timaeus, develops this theme by examining life, embodiment, and material necessity as dimensions of the world that submit to intelligible order while also resisting full conceptual closure. Related projects extend this work into Plato on eros and self-knowledge, Aristotle on imagination and ethical life, and Roman Stoicism on friendship, emotion, and political belonging.

My teaching is continuous with this research. I understand the classroom as a place where students practice what the ancient tradition calls logon didonai: giving an account. I call the central pedagogical habit active receptivity. By this I mean the disciplined openness required to let a text, an argument, or another person challenge one’s settled assumptions. Active receptivity is not passive absorption. It asks students to formulate claims, locate textual warrant, face objections, revise judgments, and take responsibility for what they say.

I design courses as graduated exercises in accountable inquiry. In my 200-level writing course, students learn the basic disciplines of philosophical reading and writing through ancient texts by Hesiod, Presocratic thinkers, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, and Seneca. The goal is to teach students that interpretation is not personal reaction but a disciplined response to what a text says, what it assumes, and what it leaves unresolved. In upper-level courses, students move from conceptual framing to analytical writing, oral interview, group enactment, peer review, and final oral defense. There, philosophical argument becomes public reasoning. In my graduate seminars, students become co-responsible for the inquiry itself by leading extended seminar discussions, writing prompt responses, developing paper projects, and generating the questions through which research can proceed.

 Across these courses, my aim is the same: to help students become careful readers, responsible speakers, and independent thinkers who can remain open to what exceeds their first formulations. In that sense, the philosophical “what?” question is never merely abstract; pursued carefully, it opens onto the more personal “who?” question by asking each of us to become responsible for the standpoint from which we inquire. Philosophy begins, for me, in the encounter between conviction and what unsettles it. My work as a scholar and teacher is to sustain that encounter long enough for thought to become more truthful, more responsive, and more free.

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