Dr Cristóbal Zarzar

My research focuses primarily on Hellenistic Philosophy, especially on ancient topics related to Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology, and Moral Psychology. My doctoral thesis offers a novel reconstruction of part of the long-running epistemological debate between the Stoics and the members of the sceptical Academy concerning the validity of sense-perception as a secure foundation for knowledge—a debate that is notable both for its sophistication and its continuing relevance to epistemology. I am currently working on a monograph based on this study, The Stoic cognitive impression and the Academic ‘indistinguishability argument’: a study of an epistemological debate.

My new project—‘Loss, grief, and its therapy: philosophical perspectives from ancient Greece and Rome’—is a systematic and comparative examination of ancient philosophical views on grief, understood as an emotional response to bereavement, and of the different types of attitudes they thought appropriate for us to adopt towards it, including various forms of consolatory therapy. The study will offer a comprehensive analysis of the topic, covering several figures from Plato (c. 4th BCE) to Galen (c. 2nd–3rd CE), and will challenge widespread assumptions about ancient responses to grief, which tend to oversimplify them as uniformly hostile. Instead, it will present a more nuanced and accurate picture of how grief was philosophically evaluated and therapeutically addressed in the ancient world.