Mariska Leunissen (NHC Fellow, 2022–23)

Mariska Leunissen (PhD, Leiden University, 2007) is professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her main research interests are in Aristotelian natural philosophy and philosophy of science, and more recently in Aristotle’s natural scientific study of women and motherhood and its intersection with representations of conception, pregnancy, and motherhood in ancient medicine (mainly the Hippocratic tradition) and Greek tragedy (mainly Euripides). She is the author of two monographs on Aristotle, Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle’s Science of Nature (CUP 2010) and From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle (OUP 2017). She is also the editor of Aristotle's Physics: A Critical Guide (CUP 2015) and coeditor of Interpreting Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics in Late Antiquity and Beyond (Brill 2011), and her papers have appeared in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Phronesis, Apeiron, and in several edited volumes. She currently serves on the board of directors for the Journal of the History of Philosophy and on the editorial board of Apeiron.

Selected Publications

• Leunissen, Mariska. “Women in Ancient Medical Texts as Sources of ‘Maternal’ Knowledge for Aristotle.” In The Routledge Handbook on Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy, edited by Sara Brill and Catherine McKeen. New York: Routledge. Forthcoming.
• Leunissen, Mariska. “Variety of Animal Kinds: Empiricism and Hearsay in Aristotle’s Zoology” in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Biology, edited by Sophia M. Connell, 64–82. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
• Leunissen, Mariska. From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
• Leunissen, Mariska, ed. Aristotle’s Physics: A Critical Guide. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• Leunissen, Mariska. Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle’s Science of Nature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.