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Julia Annas

Regents Professor of Philosophy
Ph.D., Harvard University, 1972
Ethics, Greek Philosophy
Personal Website

Julia Annas (Ph.D., Harvard), Regents Professor of Philosophy, was at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, for fifteen years before coming to Arizona. She specializes in almost every facet of ancient Greek philosophy, including ethics, psychology and epistemology. Her current research interests are in Platonic ethics. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the founder and former editor of the annual journal, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. And she's really smart!

Current Research

  • 'Marcus Aurelius: Ethics and its Background'.  Forthcoming in a collection edited by Elisabetta Cattanei and Giancarlo Movia.
  • 'Being Virtuous and Doing the Right Thing', Presidential Address to the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, March 2004.
  • 'Virtue Ethics'.  Forthcoming in The Oxford Companion to Ethical Theory, edited by David Copp.
  • 'Virtue Ethics: What Kind of Naturalism?'. Forthcoming in Virtue Ethics, Old and New, edited by Stephen Gardiner.
  • 'Ancient Scepticism and Ancient Religion'.

Books

  • Aristotle's Metaphysics M and N, translated with introductory essay and philosophical commentary, Oxford, Clarendon Aristotle Series, 1976. Reprinted with corrections 1987.
  • An Introduction to Plato's Republic, Oxford University Press, 1981. Second edition 1984.
  • Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind, University of California Press, 1992.
  • The Morality of Happiness, Oxford University Press, 1993.
  • Platonic Ethics, Old and New. Cornell University Press, 1999.
  • Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, Very Short Introduction series, 2000. This is being translated into Chinese, Spanish and Dutch.
  • Plato: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, Very Short Introduction series, 2003. This is being translated into Russian.

Selected Publications

  • ‘The Structure of Virtue,’ Intellectual Virtue: perspectives from ethics and epistemology, ed. M DePaul and L. Zagzebski, Oxford University Press 2003, 15-33.
  • ‘Happiness as Achievement,’ in Daedalus 2004, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
  • ‘My Station and its Duties: Ideals and the Social Embeddness of Virtue,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 2002, 109-123.
  • ‘What are Plato’s “Middle” Dialogues in the Middle Of?’ in New Perspectives on Plato, Modern and Ancient,edited by Julia Annas and Christopher Rowe, Harvard University Press 2002, 1-23.
  • ‘Democritus and Eudaimonism,’ in Presocratic Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Alex Mourelatos, edited by Victor Caston and Daniel Graham, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2002, 169-181.

Books Edited

  • (With Jonathan Barnes) The Modes of Scepticism, Cambridge University Press, 1985. Translated into Japanese 1990 (Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo).
  • (With Jonathan Barnes), Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, translation with notes, Cambridge University Press, 1994.  Reprinted as a text in Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, with a new introduction by Jonathan Barnes, 1999.
  • (With Robin Waterfield). Plato's Statesman, translation by Robin Waterfield, with Introduction and notes by Julia Annas. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge Texts in Political Thought, 1995.

Teaching

  • Plato: Ethics, Politics, and the Soul
  • Plato: Metaphysics and Epistemology
  • Aristotle: Ethics, Politics, and Drama
  • Aristotle: Science, Knowledge, and Metaphysics
  • Ancient Ethical Theory
  • Ancient Theory of Knowledge
  • Presocratics