
Biography
Sosseh Assaturian is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington, Seattle. Sosseh’s area of specialization is Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, especially philosophy of language, metaphysics, and logic, with a focus on the Stoics. She is particularly interested in the Stoic theory of lekta, the development of theories of language, grammar, reference, and meaning in antiquity, and applications of ancient semantic theory in contemporary philosophy of language.
While her research primarily concerns Hellenistic philosophy, she has also published on metaphysics, science, and inquiry in the Presocratics and Plato, and has interests in feminist and comparative approaches to ancient philosophy. Outside of ancient philosophy, she has broad interests in 20th century analytic philosophy and contemporary work at the intersection of philosophy of language and metaphysics.
Prior to joining the University of Washington, Sosseh was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a doctoral student in the Joint Program for Ancient Philosophy. Her dissertation, The Stoics on Language and Reality, reconstructed a new picture of how the Stoics conceptualize the relation between language and the world, as mediated by lekta.
Research
Selected Research
- Assaturian, Sosseh. "Parmenides’ Doxa and the Norms of Inquiry: A Case Study of the Fragments on Astronomy." In Colin C. Smith (ed.), Inquiring Into Being: Essays on Parmenides. Albany: State University of New York Press (2025). Download PDF
- Assaturian, Sosseh. "Why Children, Parrots, and Actors Cannot Speak: The Stoics on Genuine and Superficial Speech." Apeiron 55, no. 1 (November, 2022): 1-34.
- Assaturian, Sosseh. "What's Eleatic About the Eleatic Principle?" Archai 31, no. 3 (December, 2021): 1-37.
- Assaturian, Sosseh. Review of Melissus and Eleatic Monism, by Benjamin Harriman. The Classical Review 69, no. 2 (May 2019): 365-366.
- Assaturian, Sosseh. "What the Forms are Not: Plato on Conceptualism in Parmenides 132b-c." Philosophical Studies 177, no. 2 (December, 2019): 353-368.
- Assaturian, Sosseh and Matt Evans. Review of Parmenides' Grand Deduction: A Logical Reconstruction of the Way of Truth, by Michael Wedin. Journal of the History of Philosophy 53, no. 4 (October 2015): 775-776.