Joshua Mendelsohn, PhD

Assistant Professor

Joshua Mendelsohn earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2019, completing the Joint Program in Classics and Ancient Philosophy. He joined the department in the same year. His primary area of research is in ancient Greek philosophy. His work explores ideas in Aristotle's logic, metaphysics and epistemology as well as their aftermath throughout the history of philosophy, up to and including the present.

Selected publications

The "premises only" view of the syllogism. In Graziana Ciola & Milo Crimi (eds.), Validity Throughout History, Philosophia Verlag. forthcoming.
Aristotle: Epistemology. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2024.

Aristotle: Epistemology For Aristotle, human life is marked by special varieties of knowledge and understanding. Where other animals can only know that things are so, humans are able to understand why they are so. Furthermore, humans are the only animals capable of deliberating in a way that is guided by a conception of a flourishing … Continue reading Aristotle: Epistemology →
Aristotle on the Objects of Natural and Mathematical Sciences. Ancient Philosophy Today 5 (2): 98-122. 2023.

In a series of recent papers, Emily Katz has argued that on Aristotle's view mathematical sciences are in an important respect no different from most natural sciences: They study sensible substances, but not qua sensible. In this paper, I argue that this is only half the story. Mathematical sciences are distinctive for Aristotle in that they study things ‘from’, ‘through’ or ‘in’ abstraction, wher…Read more
In a series of recent papers, Emily Katz has argued that on Aristotle's view mathematical sciences are in an important respect no different from most natural sciences: They study sensible substances, but not qua sensible. In this paper, I argue that this is only half the story. Mathematical sciences are distinctive for Aristotle in that they study things ‘from’, ‘through’ or ‘in’ abstraction, whereas natural sciences study things ‘like the snub’. What this means, I argue, is that natural sciences must study properties as they occur in the subjects from which they are originally abstracted, even where they reify these properties and treat them as subjects. The objects of mathematical sciences, on the other hand, can be studied as if they did not really occur in an underlying subject. This is because none of the properties of mathematical objects depend on their being in reality features of the subjects from which they are abstracted, such as bodies and inscriptions. Mathematical sciences are in this way able to study what are in reality non-substances as if they were substances.
"Men go grey": Robert Kilwardby and the Logic of Natural Contingency. In Jens Lemanski & Ingolf Max (eds.), Historia Logicae and its Modern Interpretation, College Publications. 2023.
Aristotle’s argument for the necessity of what we understand. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 62. 2023.
Hale on Logical and Absolute Necessity: What You Put In Is What You Get Out. Argumenta 14. 2022. With Simon H. Babbs.
The way past the stripping argument in Hegel and Aristotle. In Glenn Alexander Magee (ed.), Hegel and Ancient Philosophy : a Re-Examination, Routledge. 2018.
Term Kinds and the Formality of Aristotelian Modal Logic. History and Philosophy of Logic 38 (2): 99-126. 2017.

Dissertation

Aristotle on the Necessity of What We Know. Dissertation, The University of Chicago. 2019.