Peter Osorio

Assistant Professor of Classics
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232 Boylston Hall
(617)-495-9625
posorio@fas.harvard.edu

Office Hours F25: MW 11-12

Peter Osorio is a historian of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, with interests tending towards epistemology and ethics. After his doctorate at Cornell University, he was a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto and then Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has also taught in classics and in philosophy at the University of Rochester and at Cornell University.

Prof. Osorio's research often considers ancient debates about how people and their testimony should be treated in contexts of learning and inquiry. His first book is about Cicero’s literary translation of the Hellenistic Academy’s social epistemology and attitudes towards testimony and authority. He has published related papers on Academic scepticism, Cicero, and Cicero's philosophical contemporaries. He is also working on a series of papers related to a second book project, on the philosophical functions of the literary form of the epistle, or letter, in such authors as Epicurus, Seneca, Iamblichus, and pseudonymous Socratics and Platonists. Other published work covers Plato, sophists, ancient science, and early modern to modern historians of philosophy.

Prof. Osorio offers courses in ancient Greek and Latin alongside courses in translation on ancient philosophy and other intellectual traditions. Greek and Latin courses he has taught in the past have read authors including Plato, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Antiphon, Lysias, Cicero, Ovid, Horace, Seneca, and Descartes.

Selected Papers

  • “Cicero and Translation,” in Translating Latin and Greek: A Guide for Classicists and Others, ed. M. Revermann (CUP, forthcoming)
  • “The Platonic Epistles and Fanaticism in the History of Philosophy: Meiners, Tiedemann, and Kant,” TAPA 154.2 (2024: 437–69)
  • “Trust and Persuasion: Testimony in [Plato], Demodocus,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 113 (2024)
  • “The Ciceronian Dialogue” (with C. Brittain), in The Cambridge Companion to Cicero’s Philosophy, eds. J. Atkins and T. Bénatouïl, Cambridge (2021: 25–42)
  • “Reconstructing Brutus’ De Virtute: Consolation and Antiochean Fundamentalism,” Phronesis 66.1 (2021): 52–83
  • “Vergil’s Physics of Bugonia in Georgics 4,” Classical Philology 115.1 (2020): 27–46
  • "Protagoras’ Homo-Mensura Doctrine and Literary Interpretation in Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi,” Mnemosyne 71.6 (2018): 1043–52"

Education

  • PhD in Classics (Ancient Philosophy) - Cornell University 2021
  • Post-Baccalaureate in Classical Languages and Literature - University of Pennsylvania 2014
  • BA in Classical Studies and Economics - Dartmouth College 2012