The primary focus of my research is on the concept of imagination and its roles in politics and the history of political thought. The imagination is one of the most basic human mental faculties. Just like reason and emotions, it is crucial for our understanding of politics and of key political concepts such as justice, freedom, legitimacy, and stability. I am working on two book projects that aim to recover the historical meaning of this concept and demonstrate how it can enrich our understanding of past and present democratic practices.
Project I: The Invention of Imagination
My first book manuscript, The Discovery of Imagination, offers a new account of the earliest origins of the concept of “imagination” in archaic and classical Greece and explores its potential roles in democratic politics. It is motivated by the current global crisis of liberal democracy and the growing gaps between how democratic citizens view and understand their social and political world. I argue that this phenomenon—often described today in terms of “deep disagreement” or “belief polarization”—can be traced back to the earliest days of Western philosophy and that it is inextricably tied to the discovery of the concept of imagination. The imagination was “discovered” within an environment of radical epistemic uncertainty, as part of an attempt to explain how and why different individuals perceive the world in different ways. Recovering this untold history of imagination and situating it within the context of the ancient Athenian democracy can inform our search for democratic remedies to our own crisis of epistemic fragmentation, disagreement, and polarization.
The Discovery of Imagination begins by offering a novel account of the earliest origins of the concept of imagination. Scholarship on this topic tends to start with Plato, with little to no work dedicated to the questions and issues that have made this concept an urgent object of investigation for him and later philosophers. Tracing the roots of the ancient Greek terms for imagination back to epic and tragic poetry, I show that they were often used to capture the subjectivity of human experience and in the context of various episodes that depict a world of radical epistemic uncertainty. I call this the “problem of imagination”: the idea that, given imagination’s role in producing mental representations of the world, and since these representations tend to vary across individuals, the imagination may undermine our ability to have a shared experience of the world and agree on the nature of the world, the language we use to describe it, or the actions we should take to preserve or change it. This problem is, of course, still very much alive today, even though the language of “imagination” has come to be replaced by more contemporary terms of art, such as “belief polarization” or “deep disagreements.”
In the second part of the book, I show how later political developments—particularly the birth of democracy in Athens—transformed the problem of imagination from an epistemological issue into a pressing political concern, motivating philosophers like Plato and Aristotle to turn the imagination into an object of philosophical inquiry. In short, the Athenian assembly was composed of a diverse body of citizens, each guided by what Arendt would later call the dokei moi—it “seems to me”—and their own unique and subjective mental representation of the world. Yet, if each individual citizen is guided and motivated by how the world appears to them, how are they expected to make collective decisions and act as one? To put it differently, when the Athenian assembly announced its decisions, it proclaimed that they “seemed [good] to the demos” (edoxe tōi dēmōi). But how could the Athenians transform the individual dokei moi, “it seems to me,” into dokei tōi dēmōi, “it seems good to the demos,” to us? As I argue in the final chapter—and in “Political Phantasies: Aristotle on Imagination and Collective Action” (American Journal of Political Science, 2024)—Aristotle sought to address this problem by means of a free, deliberative, and collective effort of the community. For Aristotle, our imagination is shaped by our moral character, which, in turn, is formed by our actions and activities. His solution to the problem of imagination is thus found in the creation of a shared imagination through civic education: the active participation of citizens in their own democratic institutions, which shapes their identity as democratic citizens and the way they see the world and their fellow citizens.
The book is under advance contract with the Philosophy of Memory and Imagination series at Oxford University Press (ed. Amy Kind) and is scheduled to be sent out for review by August 2026. To date, this project has generated several additional stand-alone papers. In “Political Imagination and Its Limits” (Synthese, 2022), I propose a new conceptual framework for the “political imagination,” outlining the different roles imagination plays in politics. “Imagination and Creativity in the Political Realm” (forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination and Creativity) focuses on the creative function of imagination and the potential benefits and risks posed by the creative imagination to our social and political life. Finally, in “Aristophanes’ Critical Imagination” (in progress), I utilize the comic plays of Aristophanes to examine the important—yet often neglected—critical function of the imagination, demonstrating its importance for maintaining a healthy and stable democracy.
Taken as a whole, this project generates novel theoretical insights into the role of imagination in past and present democratic politics. At the same time, it also seeks to inform democratic citizens who face tremendous challenges, from climate change and racial justice to populism and democratic backsliding. Addressing these challenges requires not only a significant amount of ingenuity and innovation. It also demands that we reimagine the meaning and practice of democratic citizenship today and utilize our political imagination to promote a more stable, just, and diverse collective life.
Project II: Imagination in the History of Political Thought
My second book project, The Catching of Beelzebub: Thomas Hobbes’s Philosophy of Imagination (in progress), focuses on the relationship between imagination, knowledge, and authority in the history of ideas. Hobbes, like other leading figures of the new science and Enlightenment, is often viewed as celebrating human reason and rationality. However, Hobbes was equally captivated by the irrational (or, rather, pre-rational) aspects of the human mind. The imagination, in particular, was of special interest to Hobbes, although his engagement with this mental faculty is often overlooked by contemporary scholarship. In one of the published articles from this project, “Leviathan Versus Beelzebub: Hobbes on the Prophetic Imagination” (History of European Ideas, 2023), I contextualize Hobbes’s theory of imagination to reveal his unique intervention in the scientific debates of the seventeenth century. I argue that this intervention is designed to solve a tension between Hobbes’s scientific and political commitments. On the one hand, his scientific commitment led him to take the imagination seriously. While unorthodox in many ways, Hobbes was working within the predominant scientific framework of his time, which can be traced back to the works of Aristotle and Galen. The same framework, however, was used for naturalistic explanations for prophecy. This posed a problem for Hobbes, who was equally committed to the advances of science and to guarding against the political threat posed by prophets. I argue that Hobbes’s theory of imagination resolves this tension by constructing a scientific account of imagination that is loyal to the leading scientific ideas of its time while neutralizing any potential threats the imagination may pose to political order and stability.
The Catching of Beelzebub not only offers the first systematic study of Hobbes’s theory of imagination but also contributes to our understanding of the “politics of science” and the relationship between science and politics in early modern Europe. It reveals how the debates around the nature and powers of imagination were entangled with the political concerns and anxiety of the present moment. In the case of Hobbes, the fact that scientific theories of the mind could be used to explain and legitimize prophecy made these theories politically dangerous, as prophets could—and, from his perspective, did—undermine political unity and authority. At the same time, it demonstrates the challenges posed by imagination to both science and politics. Hobbes supposed that part of the inevitable conflict and disagreements between individuals in his “state of nature” is due to the radical subjectivity of our perception of the world. This, in turn, highlights the need for an external coercive authority not only to enforce law and order but also to establish an epistemological framework that enables humans to have a shared understanding of the world, making both science and politics possible.
Additional Research and Collaborations
In addition to these two long-term projects, I have several stand-alone papers that further explore questions of political authority, legitimacy, and stability in the history of ideas. The first, “Divine Epiphany and Political Authority in Plato’s Republic” (History of Political Thought, 2023), offers a new interpretation of Plato’s theological principles in the Republic. The philosophers are meant to be the sole source of political authority in the ideal city. Ancient Greek theology, however, espoused a model of epiphany in which any individual, in principle, could experience an encounter with the divine, thus potentially undermining the philosopher’s monopoly over knowledge and authority. I argue that Plato seeks to undermine this potential threat to the authority of the philosophers, calling into question the possibility of an individual encounter with the divine. At the same time, Plato appropriates the language and concepts of divine epiphany in the service of his new, philosophical model of epiphany, thereby further establishing the philosopher’s authority and legitimacy in his ideal city.
In “Risk and Quietness: Pericles’ Funeral Oration and the Mythical ‘Catalogue of Exploits’” (Political Theory, 2025), I offer a novel answer to an old puzzle in Thucydides scholarship: that among the surviving Funeral Orations, Pericles’ is the only one that does not mention the Athenian mythical Catalogue of Exploits. Situating the Oration within a contested debate regarding the nature of Athenian identity, I explain this omission as a response to a challenge posed by a commonly held depiction of Athens’ national character, which highlights the restless and venturesome aspects of Athenian identity and its natural tendency for risk-taking. I further explore this theme in “Revisiting the Meaning of syllogos at Thucydides 2.22” (working paper). Was Pericles a devoted democrat or a de facto monarch? I offer a new interpretation of a key passage in the History, where Thucydides describes Pericles’ decision not to call an assembly during an attack on Athens. I argue that this passage should be read as demonstrating Pericles’ attempt to prevent not only an assembly meeting at a crucial moment but also any kind of public debate and deliberation that may contradict his executive decision.
I have an active interest in collaborations across the different subfields of political theory and political science. In “Du Bois’ Platonic Egalitarianism” (in progress), Desmond Jagmohan and I offer an original account of the underlying Platonic themes in W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. Understanding Du Bois’ appropriation of Plato’s doctrine, we argue, sheds new light on some of the most controversial aspects of this work, revealing deeply egalitarian intentions within ideas that are normally considered elitist and paternalistic. This collaboration illustrates what I take to be the broader potential uses of classical political thought today and the applicability of the history of political thought to a wide range of contemporary topics and debates. It provides resources for innovative teaching in political theory, drawing new connections between different authors, and engaging undergraduates in the study of the history of political thought by relating it to topics they deeply care about today.