About

Professor Catherine Atherton holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Classics and Philosophy at UCLA. Her research and teaching interests include Hellenistic philosophy, ancient grammarians, the history of the theory of language, and the Herculaneum papyri. She publishes mainly in the fields of ancient philosophy, rhetoric, and grammar. Her book, The Stoics on Ambiguity, is recognized as the definitive text on the subject. She obtained her B.A. and her Ph.D. at Cambridge University and has taught at Cambridge, Nottingham, and Oxford.

Research topics

• Psychology
• History
• Philosophy
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Stoics and Epicureans on Language and the World

  Routledge eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Linguistics
  • History
  • Psychology

  Sketching Epicurean and Stoic interests in and contributions to the study of language is an exercise in sharp contrasts rather than subtle chiaroscuro. Underlying their disagreements in these fields are fundamentally opposed, entrenched positions on the nature and proper constituents of philosophy, on its relations to other disciplines such as rhetoric, poetics, and musicology, and on the value and proper contents of systematic instruction, especially for the young. This paper uses primary sources to illustrate these differences, and to outline their causes and ramifications.

  PublisherDOI

• Deception Detection and Truth Detection Are Dependent on Different Cognitive and Emotional Traits: An Investigation of Emotional Intelligence, Theory of Mind, and Attention

  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin · 2018-09-28 · 30 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Despite evidence that variation exists between individuals in high-stakes truth and deception detection accuracy rates, little work has investigated what differences in individuals' cognitive and emotional abilities contribute to this variation. Our study addressed this question by examining the role played by cognitive and affective theory of mind (ToM), emotional intelligence (EI), and various aspects of attention (alerting, orienting, executive control) in explaining variation in accuracy rates among 115 individuals (87 women; mean age = 27.04 years [ SD = 11.32]) who responded to video clips of truth-tellers and liars in real-world, high-stakes contexts. Faster attentional alerting supported truth detection, and better cognitive ToM and perception of emotion (an aspect of EI) supported deception detection. This evidence indicates that truth and deception detection are distinct constructs supported by different abilities. Future research may address whether interventions targeting these cognitive and emotional traits can also contribute to improving detection skill.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Rapid response learning of brand logo priming: Evidence that brand priming is not dominated by rapid response learning

  Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology · 2017-08-31

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Repetition priming increases the accuracy and speed of responses to repeatedly processed stimuli. Repetition priming can result from two complementary sources: rapid response learning and facilitation within perceptual and conceptual networks. In conceptual classification tasks, rapid response learning dominates priming of object recognition, but it does not dominate priming of person recognition. This suggests that the relative engagement of network facilitation and rapid response learning depends on the stimulus domain. Here, we addressed the importance of the stimulus domain for rapid response learning by investigating priming in another domain, brands. In three experiments, participants performed conceptual decisions for brand logos. Strong priming was present, but it was not dominated by rapid response learning. These findings add further support to the importance of the stimulus domain for the relative importance of network facilitation and rapid response learning, and they indicate that brand priming is more similar to person recognition priming than object recognition priming, perhaps because priming of both brands and persons requires individuation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• From Plato to Priscian

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2013-07-01 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract A literary canon remained the core of élite education in Classical Antiquity for centuries, while the discipline of grammar emerged to produce correct texts, explain, and evaluate it. But it was to philosophy that grammarians owed, not merely powerful theories of language’s origins, functions, constituents, and structures, all formulated in a rich meta-language, but the very conception of linguistic phenomena – as constituting a fundamentally rational system – that makes expert or scientific knowledge of them possible. Grammatical interests, whether accounting for (apparent) departures from formal or syntactic regularity, determining both the correct reading of a disputed Homeric verse and the correct rules for such a procedure, or defining the parts of speech in a school primer, of course ousted the original philosophical contexts and purposes: when the Stoic Chrysippus advised using nannies who spoke pure Greek, his aim, probably, was to improve their charges’ souls, not their economic or social prospects.

  PublisherDOI

• Epicurean philosophy of language

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2009-07-02 · 95 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Is there such a thing as 'Epicurean philosophy of language'? There was, of course, no division or discipline so labelled within the Epicurean system. But that is a merely superficial objection: almost since there have been philosophers at all, they have been reflecting on many of the phenomena and problems now staked out as their territory by today's philosophers of language, although what earlier philosophers thought was worth investigating about language will not necessarily chime with modern priorities. Thus when we ask of any classical text the sorts of questions pursued by today's philosophers of language - such as how we manage to talk about the world, and to say true and false things about it; how language is related to thought; what a theory of meaning should look like - what we do not find may be at least as significant as what we do, just as what their contemporaries may have thought valuable or vulnerable in Epicurean theorizing need not coincide with our judgements. The deep problem may be that Epicurean contributions derived importance from their role in some other enterprise than that of pursuing an interest in language per se. Epicureans, like Stoics, could be powerful arguers, resourceful, subtle, dogged (cf. Cic. Fin. 1.63) - but the school's insistence on keeping one's eyes on the prize was more powerful still.

  PublisherDOI

• Reductionism, Rationality and Responsibility: A Discussion of Tim O'Keefe, Epicurus on Freedom

  Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie · 2007-01-20

  article1st authorCorresponding

  O'Keefe's contention that Epicurus devised the atomic swerve to counter a threat to the efficacy of reason posed by the thesis that the future is fixed regardless of what we do, is not supported by the evidence he adduces. Epicurus' own words in On nature XXV , and testimony from Lucretius and Cicero, tell far more strongly in favour of the traditional view, that Epicurus' concerns were causal determinism and its threat to moral responsiblity for our actions and characters.

  PublisherDOI

• The American history professor

  Deakin Research Online (Deakin University) · 2006-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

• Language and Learning

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2005-06-23 · 73 citations

  book

  The philosophers and scholars of the Hellenistic world laid the foundations upon which the Western tradition based analytical grammar, linguistics, philosophy of language, and other disciplines probing the nature and origin of human communication. Building on the pioneering work of Plato and Aristotle, these thinkers developed a wide range of theories about the nature and origin of language which reflected broader philosophical commitments. In this collection of nine essays, a team of distinguished scholars examines the philosophies of language developed by, among others, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, and Lucretius. They probe the early thinkers' philosophical adequacy and their impact on later theorists. With discussions ranging from the Stoics on the origin of language to the theories of language in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the collection will be of interest to students of philosophy and of language in the classical period and beyond.

  PublisherDOI

• Lucretius on what language is not

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2005-06-23 · 24 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In his Letter to Herodotus (75f.), Epicurus offers a strikingly non-teleological theory of the origin of (spoken) names, the first phase of which (75) is emphatically and explicitly naturalistic:

  PublisherDOI

• The Stoic Contribution to Traditional Grammar

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2003-05-05 · 98 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  The phrase 'traditional grammar' refers to the body of knowledge about the correct use of word-forms and syntax transmitted in the West at least since the early Middle Ages for the study of Latin and Greek and whose categories were used as a template for the study of other languages. It has long been recognised that traditional grammar shares numerous terms and concepts with the linguistic studies of the Stoics, and this chapter examines the relations between them.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Dorothea Frede

  Universität Hamburg

  6 shared

• David Blank

  4 shared

• Suzanne Stewart

  2 shared

• Clea Wright Whelan

  2 shared

• Ineke Sluiter

  1 shared

• Alexander Verlinsky

  1 shared

• James Turney Allen

  1 shared

• Kirsty Noble

  Bangor University

  1 shared