Profile

Career

Departmental roles

• Library representative
• Teaching Committee

Research

Overview

Research interests

I work in Ancient Greek philosophy, and more recently in Indian philosophy. My general interest is in ethics, ancient and modern, and specifically in the place of reason in a well-lived life - what might reason be that it could be ethically relevant, or even required? Thus, a morally motivated concern with reason generates a similarly motivated interest in epistemology and in metaphysics. In Plato, in Greek philosophy generally, in Indian Buddhist philosophy, metaphysics matters; and so, too, does epistemology: what we think knowledge is, or reasoning, what we think the reality is like that is there to be known, matters for the sort of persons we are and can be. What is the relation between knowing and being good? Between pleasure and reason? Between the commands of universally valid reason and the moral demand that we attend and do justice to the particular and the perceptible? These questions begin always with Plato; but it is, in the end, we who must find answers that are compelling.

Publications

Selected publications

• 'Embodying Intelligence (?): Plants in Plato's Timaeus (PDF , 173kb)'. Phronesis - forthcoming 2010
• 'Pleasure as Genesis (PDF , 207kb)'. Ancient Philosophy 31,  pp 73-94, 2011.
• with Jonardon Ganeri. 'Can You Seek the Answer to this Question?'. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (2010)
• What is peculiar in Aristotle's and Plato's Psychologies? (PDF , 266kb). In M. M. McCabe, V. Harte, R. Sharples, and A. Shepherd (Eds.) London: Published under the auspices of the Institute of Classical Studies, 2010
• 'Nevertheless: the Philosophical Significance of the Questions posed at Philebus 15b (PDF , 278kb)'. Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy 12 (2009): 103-29
• 'Embodying Intelligence: Animals and Us in Plato's Timaeus (PDF , 2,437kb)'. In M.-E. Zovko (Ed.). Berlin: Academie Verlag, 2008. 39-56
• 'Putting the Philebus' Indispensable Method to Use (PDF , 390kb)'. Ancient Philosophy 27(2007): 303-22
• 'On Plato's Lack of Consciousness' in V. L. S. Heinämaa, P. Remes, and M. Yrjönsuuri (Eds.). Dordrecht: Kluwer (now Springer), 2007. 1-25
• 'Hedonistic Persons: the Good Man Argument in Plato's Philebus'. British Journal of the History of Philosophy 14 (2006): 5-26
• 'Questioning Krishna's Kantianism'. In C. K. C. Y. Liu (Eds.) Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic, 2005. 80-99
• 'Phileban Gods'. Ancient Philosophy 23 (2003): 93-112
• Judging Strives to be Knowing (PDF , 112kb), Plato's Republic: Proceedings of the IXth Symposium Platonicum.  L. Brisson and N. Notomi (Eds). Academia Verlag, 2012-13.
• Faith Without God in Nagarjuna (PDF , 127kb)for St. Thomas and Asian Philosophy, Alfredo Co (Ed).  Buddhist moralists and moral philosophers consistently include faith as a virtue.  At the same time, early suttas show the Buddha insisting that one not take anyone's word for it, including his own.  The apparent difficulty here forces us to reconsider what the virtue of 'faith' is meant to be.  In order to illuminate a reconceived notion of faith, consistent with the injunction to think for oneself, I contrast the Buddhist virtue of faith sharply with that of St. Thomas, who presents faith as an alternative epistemological mode.  I argue that the austerity of Buddhis anti-teleological metaphysics demands the quality of mind they call 'faith'.
• 'Metaphysical Suffering, Metaphysics as Therapy' in On Suffering: An Inter-Disciplinery Dialogue on Narrative and the Meaning of Suffering.  N. Hinerman and M. Sutton (Eds).  Amsterdam: Rodolphi Press (forthcoming).

Compositions

Work in Progress:  If you are interested in reading any of the texts below, please email me (amber.carpenter@york.ac.uk) for a copy.  Any comments would be very welcome.

‘Persons Keeping Their Karma Together’ for Analytic Philosophy and Asian Thought, Tanaka et al., (Eds).  This paper argues that the notorious Pudgalavādins, Buddhist personalists, had good philosophical motivations for their claim that the person is ultimately real, and further that this claim need not amount to an assertion of the ultimate reality of a substantial self.

‘Plato on Restricting Knowledge to Make Room for Belief’ . Companion piece to 'Judging Strives to be Knowing'. While judging aims at knowledge, and not just truth, there are good reasons for distinguishing judging as something more than a failed attempt at knowledge. Considers primarily Plato's Republic.

‘Eating One’s Own: Exploring Conceptual Space for Moral Restraint in Ancient Greece’, for Ethical Perspectives on Animals 1400-1650. C. Muratori (Ed). SISMEL – Editzioni del Galluzzo.  This paper looks at how the animal-human distinction was conceived and re-conceived, forming the background from which Renaissance thinkers drew. Contrasting various appeals to language, justice and kinship, the paper argues that any stable argument against eating animals must invoke both our sameness and our difference, our belonging together and our difference from other animals. Animals are like us enough that we can recognize that their suffering and death is miserable for them. At the same time, they differ from us just because this can, for other animals, operate as no bar to eating animals, if that is their proper nourishment. We, however, have the ability to do otherwise. This capacity is the most basic articulation of the possibility of moral character and appraisal. For us, it is most proper to our nature to express our capacities for choice and self-control by extending our sympathies to whatever suffers. It is not because we regard them as human, but rather because we recognize their distance from us, that it is most our own not to eat what is not our own.

‘Ranking Knowledges and the Form of Knowledge’. An analysis of Plato's discussion of knowledge at Philebus 55c-59c.

'Substantial Freedom or Freedom from Substance?’  The legacy of Aristotelian metaphysics of substantial individuals left us a legacy of values at once one-sided and conflicted. For the demand for determinacy and the demand for distinctness can pull in opposite directions, particularly when the substantial individuals concerned are human beings. But since 'to be' at all means to be a substance, values of freedom and independence are heavily foregrounded at the expense of the 're-' virtues of responsiveness, reciprocity, and so on. These values, I argue, arise naturally to the foreground from a metaphysics that fully dispenses with substance-individuals as primary existents. Hegelian half-way houses do not suffice, I argue; to resolve the tensions in the Aristotelian picture, and revise our values, the Madhyamaka critique of substance-thinking tout court is necessary.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• 2nd and/or 3rd Year: Indian Philosophy
• 2nd and/or 3rd-year: Ancient Philosophy