This year's Zarbin lecture explores connections between Classical Studies and the history of natural science.

Prof. Holmes' research explores the Greco-Roman roots of Western ideas about the physical body, the natural world, matter, and the non-human. She is especially interested in the problems these ideas create for concepts of the subject, ethics, and politics. She also studies the long afterlife of these ideas, especially in twentieth and twenty-first century philosophy, in order to bring out their implications for contemporary engagements with antiquity.

In this talk, she uses her current research on ancient concepts of cosmic sympathy and Nature to discuss larger historiographical problems posed by doing the history of nature—that is, the history of a concept that is defined in large part by being universal and transhistorical—and the particular challenges and opportunities posed by going back to “the Greeks” in tracking this story.

Free and open to the public!

Sponsored by the Classics Department