Laurence Bloom
ACADEMIC EMPLOYMENT:
2020-Present: Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, Rhodes University
2016-2019: Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, Rhodes University
2011-2013: Visiting Teaching Fellow, Department of Philosophy, University of Cape Town
2008-2011: Graduate Teaching Fellow, Department of Philosophy, University of Georgia
EDUCATION AND FELLOWSHIPS:
2015: University Research Committee Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Cape Town
2014: Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Philosophy, University of Cape Town
2010: Ph.D., University of Georgia, Philosophy (dissertation: “Beyond the Hypothesis: The Principle of Non-Contradiction and the Unity of the Soul in Plato’s Republic.”)
2000: Postgraduate Studies in Talmud and Jewish Philosophy, Ohr Somayach Yeshiva, Jerusalem
1998: B.A., University of Georgia, Philosophy
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
AOS: Ancient Philosophy
AOC: History of Philosophy (particularly Philosophy of Nature), German Idealism (particularly Kant and Hegel)
In his Metaphysics, Aristotle says that philosophy begins in wonder. We philosophize not out of any need to accomplish anything but out of the simple human curiosity to wonder about ourselves, our world, and our place in it. To do so is both the easiest and the hardest activity. It is easy because it comes to us naturally as human beings. It is hard because to truly look at ourselves and our world requires that we see past our ideologies and dogmas, which can be difficult to even identify, and think things afresh as they are. I am a committed generalist with interest throughout the history of ideas. I am primarily drawn to questions about the nature of being, nature, and ways of being a human in the world. My research focuses on Ancient Philosophy—especially Plato—because I find his dialogues to be the best tool for me for getting into an issue and thinking things afresh.
CURRENT PROJECTS: (as of August 2023)
I am always open to and interested in dialogue about any of the issues below and am reachable by email at l.bloom@ru.ac.za.
Plato:
Currently, I am engaged in two long-term projects. The first is on the role of inquiry, or self-examination. In addition to the so-called "Socratic" or "early" dialogues, in which scholars tend to agree on the centrality of inquiry, I argue that the activity and life of inquiry as the highest good for a human being continues to play a pivotal role in the middle and later dialogues as well. I illustrate this with an examination of several dialogues generally not considered to accord inquiry the pride of place it has in, for example, the Apology. The dialogues I am interested in include the Gorgias, Republic, and Parmenides. I suggest that looking at the role of the examined life as end in itself in these texts allows us to understand its role in the "early" dialogues more deeply as well as to understand the accounts of justice and logos in the "middle" and “late” dialogues. This project is itself part of a larger research interest of mine involving a reconceiving of the relation between Plato's so-called periods, early, middle, and late, not as stages in his development so much as perspectives on, and ways in to, a single world view. However, far more interesting to me than the more scholarly question of whether or not Plato changed his mind, is the power of an account on which inquiry and knowing that one does not know can serve as a ground for both ethical action and for knowledge claims about the world.
The second long term project is on Plato's natural philosophy and his attitude towards science. Although this project connects closely to a general interest in Plato's account of imitation--and thus connects to texts such as the Republic, Parmenides, and Sophist--this project focuses primarily on the Timaeus. Timaeus’ account explicitly marks itself as a “likely story.” Why an account of the cosmos must be such—why it is even a positive feature of his account that it be likely and not certain—is one main focus of my book. I argue for a particular understanding of the reason given explicitly in the text, one that has not, I suggest, been taken seriously enough in the literature on Plato: an account of the world is likely because the world itself is a likeness. Take the following analogy: Imagine you have taken a photograph of a misty landscape. Now imagine you look at the photograph you have taken and it is not misty at all but is rather very clear. Such a photograph would not be a “good” photograph; it would not have accurately represented that which it sets out to represent. This is the situation that Plato thinks we find ourselves in as we attempt to account for the physical universe: if our account was certain and unchanging, it would not capture the mysterious and changing thing that it is accounting for; the account is likely because the world is a likeness. All this depends upon further controversial aspects of Plato’s account. Foremost among them is his assertion, repeated throughout the dialogues, that the sensible world is less than fully real—that the cosmos does not have being but rather is becoming.
Both these long-term projects connect to, and in many ways follow from, my previous book project on the Principle of Non-contradiction (or Non-opposition) in the Republic. (see below) Two papers I am currently working on connected to this second long-term project are:
“Order and Disorder in Plato’s Timaeus”
Central to Plato’s account in the Timaeus, over and above the nature of the ordered whole, is an account of that which is to be ordered. Whatever else we are to say about that which is to be ordered, it must, if it is indeed still to be ordered, lack order. Thus, Plato finds himself compelled to account for that which has no order. How to do so is not straightforward. In fact, on Plato’s own account—one which, I argue, equates being ordered with both being and being knowable—it is impossible. I argue that this impossible task is exactly what Plato is undertaking. The problem is not a new one for him; it is akin to the problem of understanding form as responsible for the being of the participant prior to participation as well as to rationally accounting for the nature of the irrational. In this last endeavor in particular Plato has a clear forerunner to whom the Timaeus makes constant allusion: the Pythagoreans and the discovery of the incommensurability of the diagonal.
“Motion as solution in Plato’s Timaeus”
A reinterpretation of the role of likeness and imitation in Plato’s eikos mythos (“likely story”); one on which a positive role opens up for motion and for things in motion. This positive role for motion, although it acknowledges and even compliments Plato’s observation that things in motion (becoming) are incomplete, allows for motion as a tool, rather than merely a hindrance, for the completion of the work of creation. I argue that proper motion in that dialogue enables the physical cosmos to achieve a proximity to form that it could not achieve in any other way. That is, motion, paradoxically, allows the cosmos to be more like its unchanging model. I illustrate this account by offering a novel interpretation of Timaeus’ definition of time as that which, “imitates eternity and circles according to number” (38a9). The positive account of motion as necessary for imitation’s completeness comes to the fore in this unusual definition.
Hegel and Kierkegaard:
“Hegelian dialectic in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or”
A reading of Either/Or on which the ethical life emerges as the completion of the aesthetic life and not as its opposite. Kierkegaard has written the text in such a way that the careful reader will see that, unbeknownst to the aesthete himself, his way of life can only be lived fully and completely by becoming its alleged opposite: the ethical life. Another way of saying this is that the true or complete aesthetic life—one that reflects fully and consciously upon itself—is not an aesthetic life at all, it is an ethical life. Yet another way of saying this is that Either/Or presents an aufhebung—in one particularly Hegelian sense of the word—of the aesthetic in the ethical. Thus, the argument is dialectical: the aesthetic, on its own terms, bears witness to the superiority of the ethical
Other general research topics I hope to focus on in the not too distant future:
Heraclitus on sensible things as contradictory. Heraclitus' account underlies that of Plato's in an important way. Specifically, the contradictory nature of sensible things identified by Heraclitus leads to their identification as imitations by Plato (Thus, this project is also quite closely connected to the Timaeus project). However, the two philosophers take their common observation about the inconsistency, flux, or becoming of the sensible world in opposite directions. For Heraclitus, the flux and insubstantiality he finds in the sensible world applies to our thinking as well. He therefore ends up with a philosophy that, when taken seriously, leads the mind into puzzles and contradictions in which it cannot rest. Indeed, his ability to steer the mind away from any sort of concrete thought seems to me unmatched in Western thought until perhaps the later Wittgenstein. For Plato, on the other hand, our very ability to see the inconsistency, and even perhaps its unavoidability, points toward a deeper understanding that is beyond the flux of becoming. In this way, his account represents a sort of metaphysical version of the Socratic imperative to know that we do not know. It is in that very knowing—the knowledge of our own ignorance—that we enter into an awareness, however limited, of the unchanging.
Kant's political philosophy: I am interested in the apparent contradiction in holding persons to external, state law. The contradiction follows from the treating of persons as mere means entailed by subordinating their wills to human law. Once we see that Kant is concerned with this issue, a complex political philosophy emerges on which following the law of the land is, for the person willing to follow that law, an imperfect duty. This in the exact sense of imperfect duties given in section II of the Groundwork as duties the violation of which would contradict the will. Thus, the project also relates to better understanding the relation between perfect and imperfect duties.
Hegel's Science of Logic: I am especially interested in the subjective logic and on the sections on teleology, life, and consciousness therein and in Hegel's method.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS:
Book
The Principle of Non-Contradiction in Plato’s Republic: An Argument for Form. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017.
Plato has Socrates give a formulation of the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC) in book IV of the Republic. His use of the principle has convinced most scholars that he endorses the PNC. However, the endorsement in the text is qualified: Socrates refers to the principle as one that he and his interlocutors will hypothesize and he warns that, if it should ever be shown to be false, all that follows from it will also be refuted. The choice of the term hypothesis is significant; it is the term used in the text to distinguish between two types of knowledge. Dianoia, the lower or less true form of knowing, is based on or follows from hypotheses, while nous, the “true” knowing, moves, controversially, “beyond” hypotheses. If we take seriously the claim that the PNC is hypothetical, then any and all knowledge based upon it—or, in Socrates’ phrase, all that follows from it—would be identifiable as dianoetic. Significantly, although other hypotheses are adduced as examples, the PNC is the only explicit, operative hypothesis in the Republic. Scholars who have noticed this issue have tended to claim that the hypothesis in question can be justified. I argue against accepting this claim in any straightforward sense and that what emerges from the text if we pay close attention to this issue is far more sophisticated. In short, Plato’s concession that the PNC is hypothetical is a textual clue pointing us to a complex philosophical argument which locates the ground of the sort of reasoning associated with the PNC in an entirely different form of reasoning. That is, the PNC, though a first principle of dianoetic reasoning, is not actually a first principle for Plato. Rather, it is grounded in nous and in form. Thus, not surprisingly, pursuing the question of first principles of reasoning in Plato leads one to form. Framing the issue in this way allows us to see the text as a whole as providing an extended argument for the existence of forms.
Collected Volume
Knowing and Being in Ancient Philosophy, co-edited with Daniel Bloom and Miriam Byrd. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-98904-0#about-this-book
Articles and Chapters
Introduction, co-written with Daniel Bloom, in Knowing and Being in Ancient Philosophy.
“The Apology: Socrates’ argument for inquiry as end,” Review of Metaphysics (September 2022).
“The Contest Between Philosophy and Rhetoric in Plato’s Gorgias,” in Skill in Ancient Western and Chinese Ethics, ed. Tom Angier, Bloomsbury Academic (October 2021).
“Reading Plato and Aristotle in Contemporary South Africa,” South African Journal of Philosophy, 39 (2020): 327-346.
SOME PAPER PRESENTATIONS:
Keynotes:
“Recollection,” Workshop on Laurence Bloom’s The Principle of Non-Contradiction in Plato’s Republic, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. June 2017.
“Aristotle on Substance as Actuality,” 2016 Aristotle Colloquium, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa. November 2016.
Refereed and Invited:
“Reading Plato and Aristotle in Contemporary South Africa,” Inaugural Conference of the African Humanities Association, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. November 2023.
“Order and Disorder in Plato’s Timaeus,” 34th Biennial Conference of the Classical Association of South Africa, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. November 2023.
“Hegelian dialectic in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or,” 10th Annual International Conference of the Centre for Phenomenology in South Africa, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa. November 2023.
“Education as Self-actualization: Plato’s account of education in the Republic as paradigmatically non-modern,” Plato on the Nature and Value of Political Community, University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana. September 2023.
“The Sophist’s Hideout: On Imitation, Plurality, and Becoming,” Symposium Platonicum XIII: Plato’s Sophist, Athens Georgia, USA. July 2022.
“Desire, Reason, and the Care of the Soul,” Symposium on Reza Hosseini’s Emerson’s Literary Philosophy, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. October 2021.
“First Principles,” Philosophy Department Seminar, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. March 2020.
“Timaeus’ Eikos Mythos,” Greek Philosophy Workshop, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. December 2019.
“How the Separation Argument Frames the Method of Hypotheses,” Symposium Platonicum XII: Plato’s Parmenides, Paris, France. July 2019.
“The Craft of Justice in Plato’s Gorgias,” Philosophy Department Seminar, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. March 2019.
“The Timaeus and the Republic: A Way into the Problem of Parts and Wholes,” North American Workshop in Platonic Philosophy, Hamline University, St Paul Minnesota, USA. August 2018.
“Who Builds a Wall?,” Virtue, Skill, and Practical Reason, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. August 2017.
“Teaching Ancient Greek Philosophy in Contemporary South Africa,” Philosophy Department Seminar, Fort Hare University, East London, South Africa. April 2017.
“Proclus on the ‘Inward Turn,’” Interdisciplinary International Conference on Praying and Contemplating: Personal Religious Attitudes. Religious and Philosophical Interactions in Late Antiquity (3rd to 7th c. A.D.), North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa. April 2016.
“Plato’s Praise of Poetry,” Philosophy Society of South Africa Spring Colloquium, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. September 2015.
“Aristotle on Mimesis, Katharsis and the Unity of Plot,” Philosophy Department Seminar, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. August 2014.
“Kant, Religious Freedom and Minority Rights,” Conference on Politics and Religious Freedom in Southern Africa, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. February 2014.
“A Theoretical Problem in Kant’s Political Philosophy,” Philosophy Department Seminar, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. August 2013.
“Heraclitus and Plato,” Hoernle Research Seminar, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. March 2013.
“The Apology of Socrates: Plato’s Argument for the Philosophical Life,” Conference on Philosophy and the Moral Life, Wits Center for Ethics, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. November 2012.
“Plato on the Principle of Non-Contradiction,” Potter Seminar: Formal reasoning in the social sciences, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. October 2012.
“The Principle of Non-Contradiction in Plato’s Republic,” Eastern APA, Washington DC, USA. December 2011.
“The Good Will and the Identity of Kant’s Three Formulations of the Categorical Imperative,” Georgia Phi Sigma Tau, Athens Georgia, USA. November 2008.
Public Lectures:
“Kierkegaard’s Living Dialectic,” Great Books Discussion Series, Canyon, Texas. February 2023. (virtual talk)
“Plato on the ‘Immortality’ of the Soul,” Friends of the Library, Grahamstown, South Africa. May 2017.
“Thinking Backwards: Reasoning About the First Principles of Reasoning,” UCT Philosophy Society, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. July 2015.
“Maimonides on ‘belief’ in God,” Limmud South Africa. Stellenbosch, South Africa. August 2012.
Online lecture series on Plato's Republic:
archive.org/details/LectureCourseOnPlatosRepublic-LaurenceBloom
TEACHING:
Designing and "teaching” (with apologies to Socrates) philosophy courses is a major creative outlet for me, and one that I enjoy immensely. I do my best to organize a group of rich and worthwhile texts together around a theme or question. The question is one that is at once tight enough to give the inquiry a unity and loose enough to allow the texts the room to take shape on their own and to inspire thought in the students without my getting in the way too much. The courses that I am the most engaged by invariably go the best and are the most enjoyable for myself and my students. I believe that this is at least partially connected to the fact that my pedagogical method involves demonstrating for my students how to be engaged by a text and by ideas. One consequence of striving to demonstrate sincere engagement with the texts and ideas being investigated is that I rarely repeat a course, and never in the same way.
For a list--and brief description--of my current courses, see the sections on this website for Philosophy 1, 2, and 3/postgrad.
MA thesis supervision:
Hadley Grecia, “Kant and The Experience of Skepticism” (June 2023)
Siphosihle Wotshela, “Jacob Klein on Liberal Education” (2022)
Daniel Coughlan, “Self-inquiry in Plato and Patanjali” (2019)
Graduate courses:
Rhodes University
Plato on the Philosopher and the Sophist
Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Political Philosophy (theme: “What is the role or function of government?”)
Philosophy of Science (theme: “What is life?”)
Plato’s Republic
Aesthetics (theme: “What is art? What can one say with a work of art?”)
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
University of Cape Town
Moral Philosophy (twice, themes: “On Pleasure”; “On Friendship and Marriage”)
Plato’s Theaetetus
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
Plato’s Symposium
Undergraduate courses:
Rhodes University
Philosophers on Human Nature (Phi1)
Philosophers on “The Good Life” (Phi1)
Plato: On Socratic Wisdom (Phi2)
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Phi2)
An Enlightenment Account of Freedom from Rousseau through Marx (Phi2)
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: Rational Critics of Rationality (Phi2)
On Teaching and Learning (Phi3 options; again as Phi1)
Spinoza’s Ethics (Phi3, options)
Ancient Philosophy: What is the soul? (Phi3, options)
Ancient Philosophy: What is knowledge? (Phi3)
Kant: The Unity of Kant’s Practical and Theoretical Philosophy (Phi3)
Aristotle and Maimonides: On Practical Reason and Divine Law (Phi3)
University of Cape Town
Ethics (1010S; w/ Prof. D. Benatar)
Philosophy of Art and Literature (2016S)
Great Philosophers (2041S; w/ Dr. G. Fried)
Political Philosophy (2042F)
Business Ethics (2043F/S; w/ J. Winfield)
University of Georgia
Introduction to Philosophy (Phil1000)
Logic and Critical Thinking (Phil1500)
Introduction to Ethics (Phil2200)
Classics of Ancient Western Philosophy (Phil3000)
Classics of Modern Western Philosophy (Phil3010)
Ethical Theory (Phil3200)
Last Modified: Sun, 04 Feb 2024 18:25:53 SAST