Robert Hahn (born August 25, 1952 in New York City) is an American philosopher and since 2002 is a Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Hahn's teaching interests and specialties include ancient Greek philosophy, the history of philosophy and science (astronomy and mathematics - especially geometry), Kant and modern philosophy, ethics, and logic. His research centers on ancient Egyptian and Greek architecture and building technology, ancient geometry, and metaphysics - connecting the origins of Greek philosophy to the historical, cultural, and technological contexts of the early Greek philosophers.^[1][2]

Education

Hahn was named the Archibald Scholar and graduated as Valedictorian from the College of Liberal Arts at Union College with his B.A. in Philosophy in 1973. He was elected into Phi Beta Kappa in 1972. During his undergraduate years, He also studied Sanskrit at the University of Chicago (Summer, 1972). Hahn began his first-year graduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley, transferring the following year to Yale University where he went on to earn three degrees: M.A. in Philosophy (1975), M.Phil. in Philosophy (1975), and Ph.D. in Philosophy (1976, when he was 23 years old). Hahn won Yale's Mary Cady Tew Prize for the Outstanding Graduate Student in Philosophy (1975) and the Jacob Cooper Prize in Greek Philosophy (1975) for an earlier draft of his dissertation.^[3] Hahn’s dissertation was entitled “Did Plato ‘Schematize’ the Forms: Structure, Value, and Time, in the Later Dialectical Dialogues,” directed by Karsten Harries and joined in committee by Robert S. Brumbaugh and Heinrich von Staden.

Early Academic Career

After graduating from Yale, in the fall of 1976, Hahn worked with Gregory Vlastos (who had recently left Princeton to become the Mills Professor of Philosophy) at the University of California at Berkeley, followed by an appointment back at Yale in the Spring of 1977 as a Lecturer in Philosophy. Subsequently, in 1977, Hahn was appointed to his first tenure-track position at the Arlington branch of the University of Texas, Arlington, but left the next year for a 3-year appointment (1978 - 1981) jointly at Brandeis University (in the Department of Philosophy and the History of Ideas) and Harvard University (Continuing Education). At Brandeis, Hahn created the Boston Area Colloquium for Ancient Philosophy which is still functioning after more than forty years.^[4] Hahn was Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the American College of Greece (Deree College) from January to August 1980. In 1981, Hahn was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Denison University, and in 1982, joined the faculty of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy. He became an Associate Professor in 1988. Hahn was awarded both the Outstanding Teacher of the College and the Outstanding Educator of the University in 1993. He was promoted to full professor in 2001.

Study Abroad Programs

The Harvard program gave Hahn the opportunity to teach philosophy, mostly to older adults, and this proved pivotal in his development of Ancient Legacies, a Study Abroad program with trips to Greece and Turkey, and Egypt. Since 1983, the program has brought together a variety of participants - from undergraduate and graduate students to members of the public - around the theme "Ideas of Excellence" and what the ideas and discoveries of the ancient world still have to teach us. The interdisciplinary, team-taught, travel-study program that Hahn began at Brandeis/Harvard, has continued for more than 40 years at Southern Illinois University. In Greece, participants discuss the Olympic games and run a short footrace in an ancient stadium; they examine vases and votives in museums and then visit a local pottery workshop where they have a chance to try to produce similar forms; in an ancient bouleuterion they recreate the trial of Socrates from a translation of Plato’s Apology that Hahn and his staff produced; they learn to make seasonal sundials on the beach as part of an introduction to ancient astronomy; and they perform an ancient play in an ancient theater with costumes and masks they make themselves. In 1992, Hahn began organizing annual trips to Egypt as part of the Ancient Legacies program.^[5][6] As of 2023, Ancient Legacies has conducted 67 separate programs, enrolling more than 1,200 participants.^[7]

Research and Publications

In the 1980’s, Hahn's research began to focus on accounting for the origins of Greek philosophy. He published the essay “What did Thales want to be when he grew-up?” in a Festschrift honoring Robert S. Brumbaugh (Plato, Time, and Education (1987)) that began to explore the contributions of engineering and technology to early Greek Philosophy. As his work proceeded, Hahn realized that monumental stone temple architecture that began contemporaneously in the 6th century BCE contributed to Anaximander’s cosmic vision in a manner he regarded as vastly under-appreciated. As he developed his knowledge of stone temple architecture in archaic Ionia, he realized that the Greeks learned much about it from the Egyptians, since the earliest philosophers – Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes – came from Miletus, a Greek city that had a trading colony in Naucratis in the Nile delta. Hahn, therefore, enlarged his studies of monumental temple architecture to include Egypt. Important publications by the architect-excavators of the temples of Hera at Samos, Artemis at Ephesus, and Apollo at Didyma by the mid-1990’s allowed Hahn access to the evidence he needed for his 2001 book Anaximander and the Architects: The Contributions of Egyptian and Greek Architectural Technologies to the Origins of Greek Philosophy^[8] and again in 2003 in a co-authored work Anaximander in Context: New Studies in the Origins of Greek Philosophy^[9] where Hahn’s monograph "Numbers and Proportions in Anaximander and Early Greek Thought" appears. In a Festschrift for Karsten Harries, Hahn published his essay "Heidegger, Anaximander, and the Greek Temple" (2007).^[10] In 2000, Hahn was invited to give the Theophilos Veikos lecture at the University of Athens and, based on the discussion there, went on to publish Archaeology and the Origins of Philosophy (2010), a book that argued how appeals to archaeological artifacts and reports could bring fresh insight into the abstract and speculative thinking of the early philosophers.^[11] While approaches to Greek philosophy tend to regard that abstract and speculative thinking arises only when one transcends the body and senses, Hahn’s studies showed, instead, that it was also by means of bodily and sensory experience that speculative thought sprang forth for the early Ionian Greek philosophers. In 2017, Hahn incorporated his studies in ancient mathematics, engineering, and cosmic speculation in his book The Metaphysics of the Pythagorean Theorem: Thales, Pythagoras, Engineering, Diagrams, and the Construction of the Cosmos out of Right Triangles.^[12] Hahn argues, by following the diagrams connected with ancient reports, that Thales plausibly knew an interpretation of the so-called ‘Pythagorean theorem.’ The argument rests on archaeological evidence, ancient Egyptian mathematics, and Euclidean geometry (the evidence of developments in geometry that preceded him and that were later preserved by Plato in the Timaeus). Hahn argues that Thales’ lines of thought had a metaphysical meaning, seen in the context of Aristotle’s testimony that the earliest philosophers imagined an underlying substance – a basic unity from which all things come and to which they return upon dissolution. Thales posited it was water, and Hahn argues that geometry might have identified the underlying structure of water (and of all things): the right triangle.

Books

• Kant's 'Newtonian Revolution' in Philosophy, The Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series, January 1988.^[13][14]
• Anaximander and the Architects: The Contribution of Egyptian and Greek Architectural Technologies to the Origins of Greek Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy series, State University of New York Press, 2001.^{[15][16][17][18][19]} 2nd printing 2005.
• Anaximander in Context: New Studies on the Origins of Greek Philosophy, co-authored with Dirk Couprie and Gerard Naddaf, Ancient Philosophy series, State University of New York Press, 2003, 2nd printing 2004. Hahn's section is “Numbers and Proportions in Anaximander and Early Greek Thought” pp. 72–163.^[20]
• Archaeology and the Origins of Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy series, State University of New York Press, 2010; paperback edition 2011.
• The Metaphysics of the Pythagorean Theorem: Thales, Pythagoras, Engineering, Diagrams, and the Construction of the Cosmos out of Right Triangles, Ancient Philosophy series, State University of New York Press, May 2017, paperback edition, January 2018.

Articles in Professional Journals

• "On Plato's Philebus 15B 8," Phronesis, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, 1978, pp. 158 172.
• "ΣΥΝΑΓΩΓΗ and the Problem of ΤΟ ΠΕΡΑΣ in Plato's Philebus 25Cl E5," Philosophical Research Archives, November 1978, pp. 1 21.
• "'Necessity', 'Objectivity', and the Structure of Transcendental Arguments in Kant's First and Second Critiques," Southwest Philosophical Studies, April 1978, pp. 126 133.
• "Aristotle as Ontologist or Theologian?: Or, Aristotelian Form in the Context of the Conflicting Doctrines of Being in the Metaphysics," The Southwest Journal of Philosophy, Vol. X, No. 1; 1979, pp. 79 88.
• "Truth (Aletheia) in the Context of Heidegger's Critique of Plato and the Tradition," Southwest Philosophical Studies, Vol. IV, Spring 1979, pp. 51 57.
• "Material Causality, Non being and Plato's Hypodoche: A Re View of the Timaeus in terms of the Divided Line," Apeiron, Vol. XIV, No. 1, fasc. 2, 1980, pp. 57 66.
• "Being and Non Being in Rig Veda X, in the Writings of the Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, and in the 'Later Plato,'" The Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Vol. VIII, June 1981, pp. 119 142.
• "Knowledge and Death in Plato's Theaetetus," Southwest Philosophical Studies, Vol. VI, No. 3, April 1981, pp. 82 87.
• "A Note on Plato's Divided Line," Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. XXI, No. 2, April 1983, pp. 235‑237.
• "Recollecting the Stages of Ascension:  Plato's Symposium 211C3‑Dl," Southwest Philosophical Studies, Spring 1985.
• "Anaximander and Architects," Proceedings of the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, December 1992.
• “Imagining Philosophical Rationality: A Case Study of Archaeology’s Contribution to Early Greek Philosophy,” SKEPSIS, A Journal for Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Research, XV/ii-iii, 2004, pp. 372–395.
• "Heidegger, Anaximander, and the Greek Temple," http://www.tu-cottbus.de/BTU/Fak2/TheoArch/Wolke/eng/Subjects/071/Hahn/hahn.htm, 2007.
• “Heraclitus, Milesian Monism, and the Felting of Wool,” in Heraklit im Kontext, eds. Enrico Fantino, Ulrike Muss, Charlotte Schubert, Kurt Sier, Walter DeGryter: Berlin and Boston, 2017.
• “Did Aristotle get the Origins of Philosophy Wrong?” Aristotle 2400  years. The Proceedings of World Congress 23–28 May 2016.  Ed. Demetra Sfendoni-Mentzou. Ancient Stageira, Ancient Miez: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2019, pp. 610–615.
• “Structural Form as an Analogical Source for Structures of Nature:”, May 24, 2019, Journal of the National Science Foundation of Sri Lanka, 2019, 47 (3): 323-331
• “Architectural Technologies and the Origins of Philosophy” in “The Origins of Western Thought,” 2020, in ARCHAI, The Journal of Ancient Philosophy, Brazil
• “Thales, the ‘Pythagorean theorem,’ and Technological Context,” in Dialogues d’ histoire ancienne, 2022, 48 (2): 25-51

References