About

John Proios is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, having joined the faculty in 2021. His research primarily focuses on ancient Greek philosophy, especially Plato's late metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and logic. He is interested in the moral, social, and political dimensions of Greek and Roman philosophical writings, with particular attention to topics such as nature, method, divinity, the human mind and soul, truth, deception, transformation, and forms of human difference. Proios works on understanding ancient thought through critical social theories, including feminist, Marxist, and other perspectives, and is currently developing a book on the idea of cognitive liberation in Plato's late dialogues. He is also involved in collaborative projects on the ancient Greek philosophy of race. His broader interests include the philosophy of life and death, Indian philosophy, especially Buddhism, the philosophy of education, and the history of science.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Sociology
• Political Science
• History
• Linguistics
• Law
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Summoning intelligence as psychological liberation in Plato: <i>Republic</i> VII

  British Journal for the History of Philosophy · 2025-08-11

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Story of Corruption

  Ancient Philosophy · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In Plato’s Philebus, Socrates’ second account of ‘false’ pleasure (41d-42c) outlines a form of illusion: pleasures that appear greater than they are. I argue that these pleasures are perceptual misrepresentations. I then show that they are the grounds for a methodological critique of hedonism. Socrates identifies hedonism as a judgment about the value of pleasure based on a perceptual misrepresentation of size, witnessed paradigmatically in the ‘greatest pleasures’.

  PublisherDOI

• PLATO, <i>SOPHIST</i> 259C7–D7: CONTRARY PREDICATION AND GENUINE REFUTATION

  The Classical Quarterly · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Epistemology
  • Philosophy
  • Linguistics

  Abstract This paper defends an interpretation of Plato, Soph . 259c7–d7, which describes a distinction between genuine and pretender forms of ‘examination’ or ‘refutation’ ( ἔλεγχος ). The passage speaks to a need, throughout the dialogue, to differentiate the truly philosophical method from the merely eristic method. But its contribution has been obscured by the appearance of a textual problem at 259c7–8. As a result, scholars have largely not recognized that the Eleatic Stranger recommends accepting contrary predication as a condition of genuine refutation. After reviewing various proposals to change the text, the paper defends this reading. Finally, the paper turns to the methodological significance of accepting contrary predication. The dialogue depicts contrary predication as an instance of a class of statements that compel the soul's disbelief. Soph . 259c7–d7 suggests that these kinds of statements are a crossroad: one can either reject them and turn to eristic discourse or accept them and practise genuine refutation. The paper reflects on what this indicates about Plato's meditations on contradiction and philosophy.

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• Division and Proto-Racialism in the Statesman

  Routledge eBooks · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Epistemology

  In Plato’s Statesman, the Eleatic Stranger applies a specialized method of inquiry—the “method of collection and division”, or “method of division”—in order to discover the nature of statecraft. This paper articulates some consequences of the fact that the method is both a tool for identifying natural kinds—that is, a tool for carving the world by its joints (Phaedrus 265b-d)—and social kinds—that is, the kinds depending on human beings for their existence and explanation. A central goal of the paper is to illuminate the extent to which this use of the method of division allows us to identify Plato as an early historical forerunner of racialism, which is an ideology according to which humanity divides into races differentiated by heritable physiological, cultural, and intellectual traits, as a way of vindicating oppressive and exploitative social, political, and economic systems. I defend an interpretation of the Stranger’s claim, much discussed in the literature, that the division of humankind into Greek and barbarian is unnatural (Politicus 262c-263a). I argue that, in the Stranger’s view, this division reflects subjective illusion and prejudice, rather than the fundamental, and teleological, structure of human social organization, which concerns how human beings rationally cooperate to self-produce as a species. Nonetheless, the Stranger’s alternative theory of the natural structure of human society, I suggest, is proto-racial in another way. Through a brief consideration of the Stranger’s affirmative and complex division of kinds in the city, I argue that he re-introduces naturalistic foundations for unjust human hierarchies through his alternative theory of natural kinds and human social teleology.

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• Plato on Natural Kinds: The Promethean Method of the <i>Philebus</i>

  Apeiron · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Epistemology
  • Philosophy
  • History

  Abstract Plato’s invention of the metaphor of carving the world by the joints (Phaedrus 265d–66c) gives him a privileged place in the history of natural kind theory in philosophy and science; he is often understood to present a paradigmatic but antiquated view of natural kinds as possessing eternal, immutable, necessary essences. Yet, I highlight that, as a point of distinction from contemporary views about natural kinds, Plato subscribes to an intelligent-design, teleological framework, in which the natural world is the product of craft and, as a result, is structured such that it is good for it to be that way. In Plato’s Philebus , the character Socrates introduces a method of inquiry whose articulation of natural kinds enables it to confer expert knowledge, such as literacy. My paper contributes to an understanding of Plato’s view of natural kinds by interpreting this method in light of Plato’s teleological conception of nature. I argue that a human inquirer who uses the method identifies kinds with relational essences within a system causally related to the production of some unique craft-object, such as writing. As a result, I recast Plato’s place in the history of philosophy, including Plato’s view of the relation between the kinds according to the natural and social sciences. Whereas some are inclined to separate natural from social kinds, Plato holds the unique view that all naturalness is a social feature of kinds reflecting the role of intelligent agency.

  PublisherDOI

• The Cause of Cosmic Rotation in Aristotle’s Metaphysics xii 6-7

  Ancient Philosophy · 2020-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In Metaphysics Λ.6-7 Aristotle argues that an unmoved substance causes the outermost sphere to rotate. His argument has puzzled and divided commentators from ancient Greece to the present. I offer a novel defense of Aristotle's argument by highlighting the logic of classification that Aristotle deploys. The core of Aristotle's argument is the identification of the unmoved substance on the 'table of opposites' as simple and purely actual. With this identification in place, Aristotle argues that the outermost sphere activates its capacity to relocate its body by rotating because this is how it can be a simple and actual substance. But unlike traditional attempts to rehabilitate Aristotle's argument, I argue that the sphere does not rotate in order to imitate the Prime Mover. Rather, the sphere rotates because that is good for it to do, and the Prime Mover is a metaphysically necessary source of simple and actual substantial being, which the sphere acts for the sake of.

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