Dr. Merrick Anderson's primary area of research is early Greek and Platonic ethics, although he is also very interested in the intersection of ethics and metaphysics in ancient philosophy. He did his PhD under the supervision of Hendrik Lorenz, Alexander Nehamas and Melissa Lane at Princeton University. He was the Keeling Research Fellow from 2019-2021.

In June 2021, Merrick was awarded a three-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on a book-project titled Just Prospering? Plato and the Sophistic Debate about Justice. The goal of the project was to reconstruct a 5th-century sophistic debate about the value of justice and then demonstrate the ways it influenced Plato’s mature philosophy in the following century. The book was published by Oxford University Press on 21st March 2024.

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In addition to his working on this book, Merrick continues to pursue his research interests in the metaphysics of the virtues and the use of historical ideas in ancient philosophical texts. He is also an active member of the London ancient philosophy community.

This year, Merrick is teaching PHIL0186, a course of his own design which offers a deep-dive into Plato’s use of anthropological ideas in his corpus.

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Merrick will be appointed as Assistant Professor in the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, starting August 2024.

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https://www.ucl.ac.uk/philosophy/people/dr-merrick-anderson

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Select Publications

• Just Prospering? Plato and the Sophistic Debate about Justice (Oxford, Oxford University, 2024).

• 'What are the Wages of Justice? Rethinking the Republic's Division of Goods', Phronesis 65 (1): 1-26 (2020).

• 'Legein to What End?', Australasian Philosophical Review, 3 (2) (2019).

• 'Immorality or Immortality? An Argument for Virtue', Rhetorica 2 (37): 97-119 (2019).