Prize for Visiting Fellow Melissa Lane

The Institute would like to congratulate our newest visiting fellow, Professor Melissa Lane, on the award of the Journal of the History of Philosophy’s 2024 Prize for her latest book, Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political.

Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics and Associated Faculty in Classics and in Philosophy at Princeton University; she also holds the concurrent position of Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College in London. Of Rule and Office (Princeton 2023) offers a constitutionalist reading of Plato’s political thought, tracing the vocabulary of rule and office across his major political and setting them in the context of Greek constitutional practice in order to demonstrate how deeply Plato was concerned in his political and philosophical thought with relations between rulers and rules, and to bring Plato’s thought into new dialogue with contemporary political thought.

Melissa will be a visiting fellow at the ICS from January to June 2025. During this time she will be working on a book manuscript exploring the figure of the lawgiver in classical and post-classical Greek thought, from Zaleucus and Charondas to Lycurgus and Solon and indeed to Moses (in Philo and Josephus), and the way in which “the lawgiver” featured as a trope in rhetorical, historical, and philosophical reflection. Topics will include the nature of law; the relationship between the roles of arbitrator and lawgiver; the role of writing; lawgiving, education, and habituation; purpose and goodness (revisiting the nomos / phusis debate in the context of the lawgiver), and comparative lawgiving (considering ancient Greek authors on lawgivers in the ancient Near East).

On Monday 20 January, Melissa will also deliver the 2025 ICS Sheila Kassman Memorial Lecture, ‘Situating the Role of Lawgivers in Plato’s Laws’. Further details and event registration here: https://ics.sas.ac.uk/events/sheila-kassman-memorial-lecture-situating-roles-lawgivers-platos-laws