Anthony Dyson Hejduk

4th Year Graduate Student | Ph.D. program in Philosophy

I am a fourth year PhD Student in the philosophy program specializing in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, with broader interests in ethics and philosophy of language as well. I focus on Hellenistic philosophy, particularly Stoicism, but more generally, I am interested in how ancient ethicists argued for their theories, such as how they used appeals to nature, analogies to other fields, and thought experiments. In my dissertation, I discuss how Stoic philosophy of language, specifically their teachings about imperatives, integrates with their ethics, metaphysics and theology. I argue that the Stoics held that certain types of imperatives (those representing the commands of the divine being) are instantiated in the world, and that human beings with properly formed rational capacities will be able to comprehend and act upon these imperatives. 

I also have interests in contemporary ethics, such as the modern revival of virtue ethics, and in the cognitive science of language, particularly mental receptivity to imperatives of different forms.

Prior to coming to Columbia, I received BAs in Philosophy and in Classical Civilization from Yale.