Forschung

The main focus of my research to date has been the philosophical process through which central con-cepts of metaphysics and natural philosophy, such as time, space, or motion, arise in Greek antiquity. By showing that such concepts were originally spelt out in ways significantly different from the way they are today, I aim to make us aware both of the rich conceptual basis we often take for granted in such a way as to have difficulty imagining alternatives, as well as to sketch out possible alternative understandings. On the one hand, my concern is to show that and how such notions result from a long process of conceptual development. This is the focus of my first two books, on the development of the understanding of motion and of space in ancient Greek thought. On the other hand, my concern is to show what may have been lost in the course of such development. This is the focus of my projected third book.
      The first book, The Concept of Motion in Ancient Greek Thought, concerns the history of the estab-lishment of motion as a proper scientific object in philosophers from Parmenides to Aristotle. The mod-ern understanding of time and space as related in the notion of motion (understanding motion as a dis-tance traveled in a certain period of time) is not just a given. The conceptualization of motion as such a complex magnitude depended on logical, ontological, and methodological developments, as well as on the integration of important mathematical notions into philosophical discussion. By tracing the devel-opment of this conceptualization, I show how antiquity prepared the path for the conception of motion we have today.
      In my first book, time and space are supporting actors, as a continuous magnitudes used for the measurement of motion. In my second book, Conceptions of Space in ancient Greek thought (currently in preparation for CUP for their series Key Themes in Ancient Philosophy), I focus on the development of spatial thinking in early and classical ancient Greek thought and how gradually different aspects, like location, direction, a metric, a frame-work for motion, were connected in a conception of what we can call ‘space’. I show that during the time period I am looking at many of the most basic questions about space were discussed for the first time in Western thought and that, contrary to common scholarly opinion, from Aristotle onwards we find a well-developed concept of space (and not just of place).
In my drafted third book, Ancient Conceptions of Time from Homer to Plato, time is the main protagonist. The book will show how the understanding of time changed dramatically in the thought of writers at the very beginning of the Western tradition. Early Greek literature – philosophical and non-philosophical – offers an unusually rich collection of philosophically interesting temporal structures, many of which are of special value in enabling us to identify and understand a wide range of subjective experiences of time. In the book I will first attempt to excavate this diverse array of temporal notions and their explanatory power for everyday temporal experiences. Second, I will show how certain de-mands from historians and philosophers led, in the end, to the formation of a unified notion of time.

      My papers’ main contributions to scholarship fall into seven main areas:
(1) The philosophy of the Eleatics (in particular Parmenides and Zeno):
“Parmenides’ system” explores the conceptual basis for Parmenides’ monism and relates to the first chapter of my first book. “The notion of continuity in Parmenides” investigates in detail Parmenides‘ Two connected papers (“Zeno’s Moving Rows” and “Reconstructing Zeno’s Fourth Paradox of Mo-tion”) focus on the most neglected and ill-regarded of Zeno’s famous paradoxes of motion, offering both a new reconstruction of the paradox that shows it to be of genuine philosophical interest and pro-posing to establish, for the first time, a clear and unambiguous text of the paradox.
(2) Plato’s Timaeus:
“Plato’s astronomy and moral history in the Timaeus” offers a solution to the puzzle of why the work combines cosmology with a fictional cultural history (the tale of Atlantis). “A time for learning and for counting” explores the role of time in grounding the rationality of empirical processes. “A likely ac-count of Necessity” argues that the receptacle of the Timaeus provides a metaphysical basis for the de-velopment of geometrical and physical space without itself being space. “The ensouled cosmos in Pla-to’s Timaeus: biological science as a guide to cosmology?” discusses the question whether Plato’s cos-mology in the Timaeus, which is essentially framed in biological terms, works with a consistent notion of life.
(3) Developments in ancient natural philosophy:
The paper “Von der Bewegung himmlischer zu der irdischer Körper - Die wissenschaftliche Erfassung physischer Bewegung in der griechischen Antike” explores why scientific enquiry of motion in ancient Greece starts as astronomy, as the investigation of the motions of heavenly bodies, and only with Aris-totle gets to a detailed investigation also of the motions of earthly objects, in Aristotle's Physics. In “Time and Space in Plato’s Parmenides”, I show how the temporal and spatial notions in the second part of Plato’s Parmenides can be understood as a response to positions and problems put on the table by Parmenides and Zeno. The article “Platonic Reception – Atomism and the atomists in Plato's Ti-maeus” investigates Plato’s extensive usage of Presocratic atomism in his natural philosophy in the Timaeus and provides a novel explanation of the puzzling fact that Plato, while thoroughly indebted to the atomists, never in his whole corpus explicitly refers to them. “Sufficient Reason in the Phaedo and its Presocratic antecedents” shows that Phaedo is the first attempt to give an account in Western thought of what can count as a sufficient reason. In “Space in Ancient Times: From the very beginning to Aristotle” I give a systematic account of the development of spatial thinking from the first Greek texts dealing with spatial notions to Aristotle’s Physics and De Caelo.  “Divisibility or Indivisibility: the notion of continuity from the Presocratics to Aristotle” aims to show that the earliest discussion about continuity in Western thought is a debate within metaphysics and natural philosophy about homogene-ity and divisibility. “Aristotle’s Measurement Dilemma” investigates in detail the first treatise of meas-urement that we find in Western thought, the beginning of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Iota, and argues that it provides him with a much narrower explicit understanding of measurement than the one he uses implicitly in his Physics.
(4) Early Greek and contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of science:
I have combined my work on Early Greek thinking with discussions in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of science in three papers: “The Labours of Zeno — a Supertask?” ques-tions the common assumption that Zeno’s dichotomy paradox gave birth to the modern so-called supertask debate in con-temporary philosophy of science and shows in how far comparing supertaks with Zeno’s original para-dox helps to make explicit the pre-conditions on which the supertask debate rests. “The unity of tem-poral experience” shows that a unified temporal framework which allows for situating all events, pro-cesses, and happenings is lacking in the very beginning of Western thinking and what effect this lack has on the quality of temporal experiences – how different temporal experiences are thus seen as experi-ences of quite different kind. “What is doing the explaining? An atomistic idea”, finally, tries to show to what extent the notion of met-aphysical explanation or grounding in contemporary metaphysical debates is based on Presocratic developments.
(5) Time measurement in ancient Greek thought
In “Cosmology and Ideal Society - the division of the day into hours in Plato’s Laws”, I argue that the first occurrence of hôra in the sense of hour in a philosophical text can be found in a passage in Plato’s Laws, and how it derives from his idea that the new ideal society has to adhere also to clear and regular temporal structures. The article ““Duration versus point in time – The conceptual complexity of the notion of hour in early Greek thought” investigates the conceptual developments in thinking about time and measurement that allowed for the gradual introduction of the hour as a unit for temporal measurement in the 5th and 4th century BCE.
(6) Plato’s Symposium:
In two papers (“The Eleusinian Mysteries in Pre-Platonic Thought” and “Plato’s Forms in the language of the Eleusinian Mysteries”), using the evidence of the dialogue, but also evidence from material cul-ture, archaeological remains and pre-Platonic literature, I argue that, in the Symposium, Plato uses sali-ent features of the Eleusinian Mysteries as a vehicle for introducing his transcendent metaphysics and his vision of the ascent to the Form of Beauty.
(7) Aesthetics:
I am mainly interested in the question how notions and concepts that are crucial for core areas of phi-losophy (like necessity, contingency, or time) are developed in literature and the fine arts. In “Contin-gency and Necessity: Human agency in Musil’s The Man without Qualities” I investigate how the gen-re of the novel allows for a concrete understanding of the problem of how to act in the face of all-encompassing contingency and for showing the consequences of viewing even the relationship one has to one’s own self as contingent. “Temporality and Genre in Early Greek Literature” investigates how different notions of time develop in close relationship to and sometimes even depending on different genres, in epic, lyric, and drama.

For a more extensive overview of all published items see https://www.academia.edu/4952884/Summary_of_Published_Research