Professor Charles Brittain, ST Lee Visiting Professorial Fellow (January to June 2011)
Professor Charles Brittain of the Program in Ancient Philosophy and the Departments of Classics and Philosophy at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, has been awarded the ST Lee Visiting Professorial Fellowship for 2010/2011 at the School of Advanced Study, which he will hold from 1 January 2011 for six months.
Professor Brittain did his postgraduate research in ancient philosophy at Princeton and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a DPhil for his work on ancient scepticism.
He has been teaching at Cornell since 1996 and is currently the Chair of the Classics Department. He has held visiting fellowships in Munich (1995-6) and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (2003-4). At present, he is participating in three collaborative research projects: ‘Plotinus in America’ (starting this year, organized by Brittain); ‘Plato’s Republic’ (2008-18, organized by MM McCabe [KCL] and Verity Harte [Yale]), and ‘Augustine’s philosophy of mind’ (2009-12, organized by Scott MacDonald [Cornell], Brittain, and Christoph Horn [Bonn]).
His research has two focuses. The first is Hellenistic Philosophy, and in particular ethical psychology and epistemology. He has published two books, as well as a number of articles, on the tradition of scepticism developed by the Hellenistic Academy: Philo of Larissa (Oxford, 2001) and Cicero: On Academic Scepticism (Indianapolis, 2006). His second research area is ancient Platonism from the 1st to 5th centuries CE. His work in this field includes articles on the development of Platonism, and a translation, with Tad Brennan, of Simplicius’ On Epictetus Handbook (London, 2002). But the centre of his research in recent years has been on Augustine’s philosophy of mind and especially on the way in which Augustine picks up and develops themes from the philosophical tradition (the Stoics and Cicero, as well as Plotinus).
During his tenure of the ST Lee Fellowship, Brittain will be working on self-knowledge in Augustine’s De Trinitate [PDF].
Professor Brittain will be associated with the Institutes of Classical Studies and of Philosophy and the Warburg Institute this spring while he pursues his research on Augustine. He will give a paper on ‘Intellectual self-knowledge in Augustine’ to the Dean’s seminar on 30 March 2011 and a public lecture in the SAS on 12 May, with the title ‘Self-knowledge in Augustine’.
