Peter Osorio

Peter Osorio is an Assistant Professor of Classics. His area of specialization is Greek and Roman philosophy, particularly epistemology and ethics. After completing his doctorate at Cornell University, he taught in classics and philosophy as a lecturer at the University of Rochester and then at Cornell University. He was the Loeb Classical Library Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto before coming to College Park.

Prof. Osorio's research often considers ancient debates about how people and their testimony should be treated in contexts of learning and inquiry. His first book is about Cicero’s literary translation of the Hellenistic Academy’s social epistemology and attitudes towards testimony and authority. He has published related papers on Academic scepticism, Cicero, and Cicero's philosophical contemporaries. He is also working on a series of papers related to a second book project, on the philosophical functions of the literary form of the epistle, or letter, in such authors as Epicurus, Seneca, Iamblichus, and pseudonymous Socratics and Platonists. Other published work covers Plato, sophists, ancient science, and early modern philosophical reception.

Prof. Osorio offers courses in ancient Greek and Latin alongside courses in translation on ancient intellectual traditions and literature. Greek and Latin courses he has taught in the past have read authors including Plato, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Antiphon, Lysias, Cicero, Ovid, Horace, Seneca, and Descartes.

Selected Papers

• “Trust and Persuasion: Testimony in [Plato], Demodocus,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 113 (2024)
• “The Ciceronian Dialogue” (with C. Brittain), in The Cambridge Companion to Cicero’s Philosophy, eds. J. Atkins and T. Bénatouïl, Cambridge (2021: 25–42)
• “Reconstructing Brutus’ De Virtute: Consolation and Antiochean Fundamentalism,” Phronesis 66.1 (2021): 52–83
• “Vergil’s Physics of Bugonia in Georgics 4,” Classical Philology 115.1 (2020): 27–46
• "Protagoras’ Homo-Mensura Doctrine and Literary Interpretation in Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi,” Mnemosyne 71.6 (2018): 1043–52"
• “Justus Lipsius and his Confusion of Chrysippus’s Distinction of Causes in Physiologia, 1, 14,” Humanistica Lovaniensia: Journal of Neo-Latin Studies 63 (2014): 197–224