Vanessa de Harven

Vanessa de Harven received her BA in Philosophy from Pomona College (1991), and her PhD in Philosophy from UC Berkeley (2012). She specializes in Ancient Philosophy, and her central research focus is on Stoic metaphysics, in particular on Stoic corporealism, on the nature of their incorporeals (including especially their novel semantic entities, the lekta, roughly, the meanings of our words), and on the status of pure products of thought, like creatures of fiction and mathematical entities, which are neither corporeal nor incorporeal. She is currently working on a book, titled Everything is Something: The Unity of Stoic Metaphysics. In addition to work on the Stoics and the Hellenistic era, de Harven has active research interests in Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology, in Socratic intellectualism, and in Presocratic philosophy.