Anna Marmodoro

Anna Marmodoro is Full Professor of Philosophy and holds the Chair of Metaphysics in the Department of Philosophy of Durham University. She is concomitantly an Associate Member of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Oxford.

She has been directing a large-scale multidisciplinary research group, with funding (in successive stages) from the European Research Council, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, and the AHRC.

She is also the co-founder and co-editor with Erasmus Mayr of the peer-reviewed journal Dialogoi. Ancient Philosophy Today, published by Edinburgh University Press (2019-), whose distinctive mission is to provide a forum for publication of work in ancient philosophy that bears on contemporary philosophical discussions or vice versa. 

The project

Title: Parmenidean Essentialism

"My research hypothesis is that there are two principal lines of thought on the ontology of substances in antiquity, namely, those who believe that substances are their essences; and those who believe that substances have their essences essentially. I argue that the first group, including Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle (and possibly others), holds what I call Parmenidean Essentialism; while the second group, comprising Zeno, the Atomists, Epicurus, the Stoics and Lucretius (and possibly others), holds what I call Zenonian Essentialism (which, I contend, is closer to today’s essentialism). Each theory accounts for the oneness of substance differently, directly or relationally, respectively. I make Parmenidean Essentialism my starting point for developing my own metaphysics of substances/objects/things. Departing from much that is mainstream in metaphysics today, my work aligns with Della Rocca’s (Parmenidean Ascent, OUP 2020) and Graham Priest’s (One, OUP 2014) in that we share the assumption that ‘to be is to be one’, but with fundamentally different conceptions of oneness among us, where mine is built on Parmenidean Essentialism. The significance of my research hypothesis and of the work that will follow from it is that it will lead, I submit, to a fundamental reconception of ancient metaphysics, a reconception of the reception of Aristotle’s metaphysics in today’s metaphysics, and a reconception of essentialist metaphysics today. During my research stay at the FMSH I would develop part of this project; and write some chapters of the book that I aim to produce."

Hosting Institution: Centre Léon Robin | CNRS, Sorbonne Université, faculté des Lettres.

Selective bibliography

• Properties in Ancient Metaphysics, CUP, December 2023, pp. 70
• Forms and Structure in Plato’s Metaphysics, OUP, December 2021, pp. vii + 232
• Metaphysics: An introduction to Contemporary Debates and Their History, co-authored with Erasmus Mayr, OUP, March 2019, pp. xii + 221
• Everything in Everything. Anaxagoras’s Metaphysics, OUP, March 2017, pp. xi + 224
• Aristotle on Perceiving Objects, OUP, June 2014, pp. ix + 304