This article investigates how Plato thinks we secure necessary motivational conditions for inquiry. After presenting a typology of zetetic breakdowns in the dialogues, I identify norms of inquiry Plato believes all successful inquirers must satisfy. Satisfying these norms requires trust that philosophy will not harm but benefit inquirers overall. This trust cannot be secured by protreptic argument. Instead, it requires divine intervention—an extra-rational foundation for rational inquiry. (Pre-print here)
Reason’s Revelation and Revelation’s Reason: Reading Apuleius’ De Deo Socratis and Augustine’s De Civitate Dei through the Lens of Novak’s Athens and Jerusalem in The Achievement of David Novak: A Catholic-Jewish Dialogue (2021)
This paper was written in honour of my undergraduate mentor, David Novak. It begins by retracing Novak’s radical response to Tertullian’s Dichotomy (quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?): the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem is not to be understood as a conflict between reason and revelation, but rather between two (sometimes competing) revelations about which philosophy and theology both reason. I then suggest that the blueprint Novak gives us for Athens and Jerusalem’s relationship (derived from his engagement with philosophical sources in the Jewish tradition) can also be fruitfully applied to the study of the Christian reception of Greco-Roman philosophy in antiquity, taking as my case study Augustine’s reception of Apuleius’ De Deo Socratis in his De Civitate Dei. (Final draft here)