Peter Manchester

Associate Professor
Ph.D. Graduate Theological Union, 1972

Harriman Hall 258
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY 11794-3750
Tel: (631) 632-7570
Peter.Manchester@stonybrook.edu

Areas of Specialization

Presocratic and ancient Greek philosophy, neoplatonism, speculative theology and hermeneutical phenomenology. Professor Manchester is also Director of the Center for Religious Studies

Peter Manchester's book The Syntax of Time: The Phenomenology of Time in Greek Physics and Speculative Logic was published in September, 2005 (Brill Academic Publishing). In 1972 he completed a Ph.D. dissertation project comparing Heidegger's analysis of temporality in Being and Time with the treatment of the interior structure of the mind in Augustine's treatise On the Trinity, and chose to continue that work in its ancient side, carrying back phenomenologically motivated questions about the nature and experience of time. With a 1975 post-doctoral fellowship at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Manchester began two decades of study and collaboration with the late professor A. H. Armstrong, initially on Plotinus's treatise On Eternity and Time, then pressing further into Aristotle, Plato, Parmenides, and Heraclitus. Coming to Stony Brook in 1980, he served as president of the North American Section of the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies from 1982-86, and has since offered regular graduate seminars on Plato and Platonism, the Presocratics, and Aristotle. An informal graduate student-working group in philosophical Greek spun off from his 1997 seminar on the Presocratics and continues to be active.