Iakovos Vasiliou

Iakavos-Vasiliou-headshot-200x200 faculty

Research Interests

  • Ancient Philosophy, Epistemology, Ethics, Moral Psychology

Education

  • Ph.D. in Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh
  • B.A. in Philosophy and Classics, Cornell University

Iakovos Vasiliou has been a Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center since 2013. Previously, he held joint appointments with the GC and Brooklyn College. He was the Executive Officer (Chair) of the GC’s Ph.D./M.A. Program in Philosophy from 2008-2017.
 
Vasiliou’s research focuses on ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of perception, and philosophy of mind in ancient philosophy. He also works on contemporary neo-Aristotelian ethics and epistemology of perception.  He is the editor of Moral Motivation (Oxford University Press, 2016) and author of Aiming at Virtue in Plato (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and has contributed to many publications, including The Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates (Bloomsbury Academic Publishing), Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press), and Plato and the Divided Self (Cambridge University Press).
 
Before joining the faculty of Brooklyn College, Vasiliou taught at Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University and Georgia State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and his B.A. from Cornell University.

Courses Taught

  • Aristotle and Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics (Spring 2020)
  • Aristotle's De Anima (Spring 2019)
  • Plato's Republic (Fall 2018)
  • Proseminar (with Miranda Fricker, Fall 2017)

Representative Publications

  • "Mixing Minds: Anaxagoras and Plato's Phaedo" in C. Harry and J. Habash (eds.), The Reception of Presocratic Natural Philosophy in Later Classical Thought (Brill, 2020), 404-428.
  • "Ancient Philosophy and Disjunctivism: The Case of the Stoics," in C. Doyle, J. Milburn, and D. Pritchard (eds.), New Issues in Epistemological Disjunctivism (Routledge, 2019), 61-88.
  • "Plato, Socrates, and Love." 2019. In C. Grau and A. Smuts, The Oxford Handbook of Love. Oxford Handbooks. 
  • Moral Motivation (Oxford University Press, 2016).
  • "Plato, Forms, and Moral Motivation" in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 49 (2015), 37-70.
  • "Platonic Virtue: An Alternative Approach" in Philosophy Compass 9/9 (2014), 605-14.
  • "Socratic Irony" in Nick Smith and John Bussanich (eds.) The Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates (Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2013), 20-34.
  • "Theoretical Nous and its Objects in Aristotle" in Proceedings for the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy XXVIII 2012 (Leiden, 2013), 161-180.
  • "Aristotle, Agents, and Actions" in Jon Miller (ed.), Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 170-190.
  • "From the Phaedo to the Republic: Plato's Tripartite Soul and the Possibility of Non-Philosophical Virtue" in R. Barney, T. Brennan, and C. Brittain (eds.) Plato and the Divided Self (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 9-32.
  • with Jonathan Adler, "Inferring Character from Reasoning: the Example of Euthyphro" in American Philosophical Quarterly 45.1 (2008), 43-56.
  • Aiming at Virtue in Plato (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
  • "Virtue and Argument in Aristotle's Ethics" in S. Tenenbaum (ed.), Moral Psychology: Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and Humanities, v. 94 (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 35-76.
  • "Reality, What Matters, and The Matrix", in C. Grau (ed.), Philosophers Explore the Matrix (Oxford University Press, 2005), 98-114.
  • "Wittgenstein, Religious Belief, and On Certainty" in R. Arrington and M. Addis (eds.), Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Religion (Routledge, 2001), 29-50
  • "Conditional Irony in the Socratic Dialogues", The Classical Quarterly 49.2 (Dec 1999), 456-472.
  • "Perception, Knowledge and the Sceptic in Aristotle", Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 14 (1996), 83-131.
  • "The Role of Good Upbringing in Aristotle's Ethics", Philosophy and Phenomenlogical Research 56 (1996), 771-797.

Books