Graduate Students

elliot welch, ph.d.

Elliot Welch Areas of specialization: Ancient Greek Philosophy, Metaphysics
Areas of competence: Early Modern Philosophy (Descartes to Kant), Epistemology, Ethics, Logic, Medieval Philosophy (including Islamic and Jewish thinkers from the Middle Ages), Philosophy of Language

Dissertation supervisor: Prof. Hugh Benson

Curriculum Vitae (.pdf)

elliot.welch@maine.edu
(207) 778-7453 (office)

I am currently Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Maine at Farmington. My main research field is in ancient Greek philosophy, focusing on the work of Plato and Aristotle. In my dissertation I argue that the Socrates of Plato’s shorter, ethical works is committed to four definitional requirements that any adequate answer to “what is virtue (or courage, or piety, or temperance)?” must meet, that the definiens picks out all and only instances of the definiendum (extensional equivalence), that the definiens is ultimately the same property as the definiendum (property identity), that the definiens explains the instances of the definiendum (explanation) and that statements about virtues involving evaluative predicates do not change their truth-value, regardless of context (semantic completeness). My recent work on Plato extends the argument of my dissertation in order to clarify and arbitrate some of the scholarly controversies in Socratic definition. Related to this is my interest in how to interpret Plato charitably. New and interesting ways to interpret the arguments in Plato’s dialogues are often available, but this doesn’t necessarily imply that they are accurate. My recent work on Aristotle attempts to support Aristotle’s insight that some features of happiness (eudaimonia or well-being) must be objective, including the feature that one can be wrong about being happy, in contrast to current work in the psychological and social science literature that assume happiness to be a completely subjective phenomenon.

Publication

  • "Self-Predication in Plato’s Euthyphro?" Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science, 41:4 (2008), 193-210. (draft .pdf)