Most of my past research contributions are in the field of ancient philosophy. I was associate editor, with the late John Cooper, of Plato: Complete Works (Hackett 1997), and I translated two of the titles in that corpus, a corpus with many different voices and styles of writing. I was editor and translator of Aristotle: His Life and School, by Carlo Natali (Princeton 2013), a second edition of his earlier book (in Italian) Bios Theoretikos.
My current research interests centre on Aristotle’s lost works, especially his introductory dialogue Protrepticus. In the years since Monte Johnson and I published our proof in ‘Authenticating Aristotle’s Protrepticus’ (Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 2005) that the fragments collected in the Protrepticus of Iamblichus are reliably preserved and presented in their original sequence, we have expanded the evidence base, established the genre of the work as a dialogue, and identified the three main speakers.
The three speakers have distinctly different voices from each other, which shows that Aristotle is capable of a sort of ‘textual ventriloquism’, in which other authors are brought into the dialogue and have recognizable styles of speaking and types of voices. So there are at least four known Aristotelian styles of writing: his style in the Lyceum works; the style of ‘Aristotle’ in his Protrepticus; and the very different styles of ‘Heraclides’ and ‘Isocrates’ as written by Aristotle in the same dialogue Protrepticus.
Very recently (the summer of 2023) I came across a papyrus fragment held in the British Library that was published in the 19th c., which seems to me to be in the voice of ‘Aristotle’ in a dialogue; but it seems to be a fragment from his On Poets, not from his Protrepticus. This is an active front of research for me at present.
