Vanessa de Harven

Vanessa de Harven has been teaching graduate and undergraduate courses at UMass since 2012, and is the Undergraduate Program Director for the Philosophy Department.

She specializes in Ancient Philosophy, with interests in contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and theory of meaning.Her central research focus is on Stoic metaphysics, in particular on Stoic corporealism, the nature of their incorporeals (including especially their novel semantic entities, the lekta, roughly, the meanings of our words), and the status of pure products of thought, like creatures of fiction and mathematical entities, which are neither corporeal nor incorporeal. She has recently published a book with Oxford University Press, titled The Unity of Stoic Metaphysics: Everything is Something.

In addition to work on the Stoics and the Hellenistic era, de Harven has active research interests in Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology, and in Socratic intellectualism.