Rachel Barney (Department of Philosophy Colloquium)

Professor Barney teaches in the Departments of Classics and Philosophy at the University of Toronto, and participates in the Collaborative Programme in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (CPAMP). Her research is on ancient philosophy, for the most part on issues of ethics and moral psychology, epistemology, and philosophical method. She is particularly interested in the questions that arise where several of these topics intersect – and, above all, their interplay in Plato. She has published articles related in various ways to Plato’s conception of the Good: one on its status as the object of our desire, one on the closely related concept of the kalon, one on Aristotle’s attacks on the Form of the Good, one (in progress) on the ranking of goods in the Philebus, and another on how Plato’s theory of the good seems to be intertwined with his critique of rhetoric. She is also fascinated by the concept of technê, craft, in ancient ethics; in addition to a big-picture paper currently underway on the topic, Prof. Barney has written one working out the role of technê in Aristotle’s function argument, and another discussing the role of technê in the argument between Socrates and Thrasymachus.