Ben Folit-Weinberg is a scholar of ancient Greek thought whose research operates at the intersection of poetry and drama, philosophy, and intellectual history. His first book, Homer, Parmenides, and the Road to Demonstration (Cambridge University Press, 2022; available Open Access), explores how the image of the hodos – the “road,” “route,” “way,” or “journey” – played a decisive role in Parmenides’ development of what we would call extended deduction demonstration and aspects of demonstration. It also sheds new light on the image of the hodos in Homer’s Odyssey and its relationship to aspects of Homeric composition, and is the first to detail the significance of the physical nature of Greek rut-roads for the history of Greek thought. This is the first instalment of a larger research program dedicated to the significance of the hodos in archaic and classical Greek thought through Plato; he has published several articles on this topic, including on the semantics of words for roads and journeying, the significance of the hodos in Homer, and how the relationship between the word hodos and its uses in different texts should be theorized.

A second research project examines the nature of aēr in early Greek thought, particularly with a view to its implications for the early Greek relationship to the physical world and what we would call “matter.” In addition, he is the Principal Investigator of a digital humanities project that explores the potential – and potential limits of the – contribution that Natural Language Processing- and data visualization-techniques can make to analyzing Sophocles’ use of language. Before coming to Ohio State University, he was the A.G. Leventis Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Bristol (United Kingdom) and a Dahlem Research School Postdoctoral Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany).