Mary-Louise Gill

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Mary-Louise Gill is a professor of philosophy and classics at Brown University who specializes in ancient Greek philosophy. Her most recent work has focused on Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “Aristotle’s Metaphysics Reconsidered,” in the Journal of the History of Philosophy (2005), and “First Philosophy in Aristotle," in A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, a volume she coedited for Blackwell (forthcoming, 2006).

As a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, she will write a book titled “Plato’s Missing Dialogue,” a study of the dialogues Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman, which lead up to the promised but unwritten “Philosopher.” She will argue that Plato left the dialogue unwritten on purpose to challenge his readers to answer its central question: “What is it to be a philosopher?” The existing trilogy constitutes a complex philosophical exercise that provides the tools and models that will enable us to work out an adequate definition of the philosopher ourselves.

Mary-Louise Gill received her PhD from Cambridge University in 1981. She has been a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (1985–1986) and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (1999–2000). She is the author of Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity (Princeton, 1989) and of an introduction and cotranslation Plato: Parmenides (Hackett, 1996).