Stephan Stephanides
Post-doctoral researcher
SHORT PROFILE
Stephan began his academic journey in 2014 as an undergraduate student in Classics at University College London, where he received the Dean’s List prize after graduating in the top 5% of students in the Humanities. Upon completing his Bachelor’s Degree in 2017, he took up an MPhil in Classics (Ancient Philosophy) at the University of Cambridge. In 2018, he was awarded with two separate awards from the Leventis Foundation and Christ’s College, Cambridge respectively to undertake his PhD in Classics (Ancient Philosophy) at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Gábor Betegh and Dr. Frisbee Sheffield. Stephan successfully defended his thesis in 2022 and subsequently graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy in the summer of 2023. During the Fall of 2023, he led an interdisciplinary seminar on "Ancient and Medieval Philosophy" at Birkbeck University, where he assumed the role of Associate Tutor for the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences.
His PhD thesis, entitled "From Conflict to Unity: Plato on Well-Ordered Wholes", re-examines the subject of parts and wholes in Platonic philosophy and argues that Plato’s conceptual apparatus for elucidating the coherence of complex wholes comprised of disparate parts (pertinent examples of which include the soul, the human animal composed of body and soul, the city, and the world) improves over time from dialogues such as Gorgias and Republic and culminates in dialogues from Plato’s later period such as Statesman, Timaeus, Philebus and Laws.
PUBLICATIONS
“PORTRAYALS OF SOCRATES - (A.) Stavru, (C.) Moore (edd.) Socrates and the Socratic Dialogue. Pp. x 931. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018”, The Classical Review 71(1) (2021) 56–59.
"Plato on the Mechanics of Koinōnia Formation", Areté 36 (2022) 149-177.
"Reconsidering the Essential Nature and Indestructibility of the Soul in the Affinity Argument of the Phaedo", Rhizomata 11(1) (2023) 77-104.
ERC PROJECT
Thinking as One: The Importance of Reciprocal Cognition for Social Cohesion in the Philosophy of Plato
Stephan endeavours to bring to light the vastly underexplored importance of the role of "reciprocal" or "group cognition" in the proliferation of positive intersubjective states which engender social cohesion like harmonia, philia, and koinōnia within the philosophy of Plato. It is anticipated that this investigation will provide a further significant interpretative window into appreciating how distinct sets of individual "minds" or "souls" are able to be bound together into unity, or what may be labelled with the hindsight of his PhD thesis a "well-ordered whole", which is the primary desideratum of Plato’s vision for the polis in his political works (Republic, Statesman, Laws). To this end, Stephan shall be offering for the first time a self-contained study on the function of interpersonal and group cognition in several different Platonic dialogues and contexts, bolstered by the underlying presupposition that social hegemony is ultimately contingent on a certain kind of reciprocal or group cognition for Plato.
The most natural starting point for discussing these issues is the dialogue Republic, where Plato outlines a utopian communal city-state bound together through bonds of harmonia, philia, and koinōnia. Crucially, these interpersonal bonds are upheld only to the extent that each individual comprising the city possesses an intrinsic awareness or understanding of the overriding hierarchical structure of the city which is most conducive to keeping the citizens together in unity. This means that reciprocal cognition, at least for Plato in the Republic, is already something more elevated than basic forms of agreement amongst a set of individuals inasmuch as it is inherently value-laden, taking us perhaps further than some modern theories of group cognition might deem plausible. Consonantly, since Plato often advances strong intellectualist claims across the dialogues (most notably the notion that only philosophers possess genuine wisdom), this raises the problem of how far a diverse set of individuals is able to acquire the same shared sense of evaluative cognition.
Applying a fusion of ancient and modern literature within his exploration of group cognition in Plato, Stephan will strive to demonstrate the hitherto largely unappreciated ways in which Plato can be read to augment, as well as occasionally challenge, our understanding of group or shared cognition today. By the same token, reading Plato with the hindsight of contemporary theories of group cognition also unearths latent aspects of Plato’s thought which reveals to us a significant dimension to his views of social cohesion.
Last Updated on April 17, 2024