Visiting Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Antiquity

Dr Simon Trépanier is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Edinburgh, where he teaches ancient Greek and specialises in ancient philosophy. His principal research interests include Early Greek philosophy, Plato, Epicureanism, and Lucretius, with particular attention to the emergence of philosophy and its relationship to literature, religion, and wider society in the ancient world. He is especially interested in the Presocratics and in ancient philosophical religion, examining how the earliest Greek thinkers began to reinterpret inherited conceptions of the Divine, nature, order, and human existence.

His work engages closely with the intellectual transition from the mythological world of Homeric religion to the emergence of philosophical inquiry in ancient Greece, exploring the foundations of metaphysics, theology, cosmology, and philosophical anthropology within the Classical tradition.

The Classical Institute is honoured to host Dr Trépanier for the seasonal four-part seminar series The Homeric Gods and Their First Philosophical Critics, examining the earliest philosophical responses to the Homeric vision of the Divine and the intellectual transformation that accompanied the birth of philosophy in the ancient world.