Open Plato Project

Mission Statement

The Open Plato Project aims to create a new kind of digital edition of ancient Greek philosophical texts, intended for both expert and non-expert audiences and produced in collaboration with scholars from multiple disciplines. The Project’s mission is to widen the audience of people who are able to find joy and meaning in the study of these texts. Its core belief is that expanding access to the study of philosophical texts is beneficial both to society and to scholarship. The first phase of this project will yield an online, open-access, and open source edition of Plato’s Alcibiades, including both a new translation and multiple layers of commentary.

A small functional sample of the text with commentary layers can be found here.

Alcibiades Workshop 2023

The Open Plato Project held its first translation workshop from June 28 to July 2, 2023 at the Center for Hellenic Studies, aiming to produce a collaborative translation of the Alcibiades and generate an accompanying philosophical commentary. The translation and commentary are currently being edited and prepared for online display alongside a “first-read” translation prepared by Ruby Blondell.

We are grateful to the CHS for its generous support, and to our workshop participants: Ruby Blondell, Emily Fletcher, Mary Louise Gill, Verity Harte, Brad Inwood, Tushar Irani, Grace Ledbetter, Fiona Leigh, Hendrik Lorenz, MM McCabe, Susan Sauvé Meyer, Mark Schiefsky, and Rachel Singpurwalla.

Our Team

Marc Gasser-Wingate

Marc is an Associate Professor of philosophy at Boston University. He works mostly on Ancient Greek philosophy, and his papers have been published in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Journal of the History of Philosophy, and Philosophers’ Imprint. His book, Aristotle’s Empiricism, was published with Oxford University Press in 2021. Marc also has experience as a programmer and web developer, both freelance and with the Digital Library Development Center at the University of Chicago, and is familiar with accessibility standards and best practices for web content.

Sukaina Hirji

Sukaina is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. She works in ancient philosophy, normative ethics, and feminist philosophy. Her work has been published in Philosophers’ Imprint, Ethics, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, and British Journal of the History of Philosophy. She has been involved in a wide variety of initiatives aimed at creating more diversity and inclusion in philosophy, including creating COMPASS (a workshop for diverse undergraduates interested in philosophy), serving for two years as a member of the Steering Committee for the Job Market Mentoring Program for Women in Philosophy, and teaching a number of courses through Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative. She currently serves as the Editor for the Ethics Review Forum on the PEA Soup blog.

Robert Howton

Robert Howton is a software engineer and a trained specialist in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. From 2018 until August 2021, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey, and prior to that was Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Currently, he works as a software engineer, maintaining and developing a large-scale e-commerce platform using a suite of technologies, including JavaScript, Swift, React, Node, SQL, and a range of cloud-hosting services.

Emily Kress

Emily is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Brown University. She received her PhD in Philosophy and Classics from Yale University in 2018, where her coursework included advanced studies of Plato’s dialogues. She has published and forthcoming articles in leading venues for ancient Greek and Roman philosophy including Apeiron, Phronesis, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, and Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. She also participated in the Yale-King’s College London Republic Seminar from 2014–2016, where she was a member of the team that prepared commentary-style minutes for Republic books VIII and X. She regularly teaches classes on ancient Greek philosophy, including both survey classes that cover Plato’s works as part of a more wide-ranging syllabus and those devoted to careful readings of a single Platonic text. For instance, she taught a class on Plato’s Republic in Fall 2020, one on Plato’s Gorgias in Fall 2021, and one on Plato’s Apology, Alcibiades, and Charmides in Spring 2024.

Patricia Marechal

Patricia is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. She is a faculty affiliate at the Classical Studies Program, and also at the Center for Hellenic Studies. She has published papers on Plato, Aristotle, and ancient medicine in venues including Phronesis, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Apeiron, and Ancient Philosophy. She is a graduate from Harvard University, where she received training in philosophy and classical languages. She teaches classes on ancient Greek philosophy, including survey classes and specialized seminars that focus on a wide range of Plato’s works. She also teaches courses on women, foreigners, and other marginalized people in Greek antiquity, and is co-editing a volume on Ancient Greek philosophy of race and ethnicity.

Katy Meadows

Katy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She received her PhD from Stanford University’s Joint Program in Ancient Philosophy in 2017. She works primarily on Plato and Aristotle, and her papers have appeared in Ancient Philosophy, Apeiron, and Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. She has also been involved in several projects aiming to promote equitable access to the liberal arts, including COMPASS, the Stanford-CCNY Research Exchange, and the Hope House Scholars Program.

Evan Rodriguez

Evan is an Associate Professor and Director of Outreach for Philosophy in the Department of English and Philosophy at Idaho State University. He has published articles on Plato, Aristotle, and the Greek Sophists in venues including the Journal of the History of Philosophy, Classical Quarterly, and The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists. He is currently working on a book project on Plato funded by an NEH Summer Stipend grant and a Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies Fellowship. He is a graduate of Yale’s Classics and Philosophy Program, where he received advanced training in Greek and Latin, including coursework in Greek papyrology for developing the philological tools used for reconstructing ancient texts. His doctoral work was awarded the triennial Conrado Eggers Lan prize for best dissertation in Platonic Studies by the International Plato Society. He was a participant of the Yale-Kings College London Republic Seminar from 2012–2016, where he was a member of the team that prepared commentary-style minutes for Republic books VI, VIII, and X.

Gabriel Shapiro

Gabriel Shapiro specializes in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. His recent work focuses on ancient Greek metaphysics, especially ontology, essentialism and the Principle of Non-Contradiction. He is currently working on projects concerning Aristotle’s argument that it is impossible to believe a contradiction, the ontology of Plato’s Republic and a forgotten argument for essentialism in Aristotle. His interests also include ancient Greek epistemology and ethics, contemporary metaphysics and the reception of Aristotelianism in medieval Arabic and Hebrew philosophy. Gabriel received his PhD from Princeton University in 2022 for a dissertation on essentialism in Plato and Aristotle, and he spent 2022–24 at NYU as a Bersoff Faculty Fellow. His work has appeared in Phronesis, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, and the Journal of the History of Philosophy (forthcoming).

Jacob Stump

Jacob is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Northeastern University. He received his PhD in 2017 from the Department of Philosophy and the Collaborative Program in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is a participant in the Mellon Foundation project on Philosophy as a Way of Life, and he leads the Philosophy as a Way of Life Working Group at Northeastern. He received the College of Social Science and Humanities’ Outstanding Teaching Award in 2021. His research on Platonic moral psychology and Socratic method has been published in Philosophers’ Imprint.

Claudia Yau

Claudia is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and faculty affiliate in the Department of Classics at Northwestern University. She received her PhD in 2021 from Princeton University, where she was a member of the Program in Classical Philosophy. She specializes in ancient philosophy and works primarily on Plato, Aristotle, and Sextus Empiricus. She has published and forthcoming papers on Plato in Journal of the History of Philosophy and Apeiron, and is working on a monograph on wisdom (sophia) in Plato’s Republic, supported by a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship. She regularly teaches ancient philosophy, including Plato, at the undergraduate and graduate level, and she has participated in outreach initiatives such as COMPASS, PIKSI-Boston, and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Foundation.

Advisors

Verity Harte

George A. Saden Professor of Philosophy and Classics, Yale University

Mary Margaret McCabe, FBA

Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy, King’s College London

Lisa Raphals

Professor, Department of Comparative Literature and Languages, UC Riverside

Mark Schiefsky

C. Lois P. Grove Professor of the Classics, Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University