Keeling Research Fellow, 2019-2021

Dr Merrick Anderson was the Keeling Research Fellow from 2019-2021. His primary area of research is early Greek and Platonic ethics, although he is also very interested in the intersection of ethics and metaphysics in ancient philosophy. He did his PhD under the supervision of Hendrik Lorenz, Alexander Nehamas and Melissa Lane at Princeton University.

In June 2021, Merrick was awarded a three-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on a book-project titled Just Prospering? Plato and the Sophistic Debate about Justice. The goal of the project was to reconstruct a 5th-century sophistic debate about the value of justice and then demonstrate the ways it influenced Plato’s mature philosophy in the following century. The book was published by Oxford University Press on 21st March 2024.

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Merrick continues to pursue his research interests in the metaphysics of the virtues and the use of historical ideas in ancient philosophical texts. During his time in London, he was an active member of the London ancient philosophy community.

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In 2024 Merrick was appointed as Assistant Professor in the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California.​

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Select Publications

• Just Prospering? Plato and the Sophistic Debate about Justice (Oxford, Oxford University, 2024).

• 'What are the Wages of Justice? Rethinking the Republic's Division of Goods', Phronesis 65 (1): 1-26 (2020).

• 'Legein to What End?', Australasian Philosophical Review, 3 (2) (2019).

• 'Immorality or Immortality? An Argument for Virtue', Rhetorica 2 (37): 97-119 (2019).