Research

Nathan's central research concerns epistemic warrant and scientific objectivity: how inquiry can justify its claims while relying on particular methods, representations, and standards of assessment. Alongside this work, he studies Plato, is developing an inquiry into musical understanding, and pursues secondary research on collective agency and institutions.

Epistemology and philosophy of science

Scientific inquiry depends on methods that can fail. Repeating a result or reaching agreement may leave a shared source of error untouched. Nathan's work asks how criticism, correction, and checks with different possible errors contribute to scientific objectivity, and what further reasoning supports warranted belief.

In Objectivity in Science, he develops an account of objectivity through public, revisable testing across methods with meaningfully different ways of failing. The account emphasizes the conditions under which a check can expose an error that another method misses. The relation between surviving such checks and having good grounds for belief remains a further question in his current research.

A connected problem concerns target continuity: what justifies treating different methods, or descriptions that change over time, as inquiries into the same thing? Comparison requires some account of what stays the same, what changes, and which differences matter. Nathan is examining how those judgments can themselves be tested without assuming the continuity they are meant to establish.

The Structure-Dependence Problem addresses the limits of inference from robust agreement. Robustness does not by itself deductively establish correspondence with mind-independent reality; a realist interpretation requires a further argument. The Axiom of Hope develops this problem and proposes methods for making the conditions of claims and comparisons explicit. Current research also examines representation, aboutness, and error, keeping the success of a representation distinct from the grounds for claims about reality.

Plato

Nathan’s research on Plato is organized around a set of long-term problems developed through close reading and comparison across dialogues. His primary current project concerns expertise and authority: when knowledge or competence concerning a good can justify directing others, how genuine expertise can be distinguished from its imitations, and what role law and institutions should play when that distinction remains uncertain.

Related research examines several connected but independent problems across the Platonic corpus. These include what makes a division or classification reveal the structure of its subject; how acquiring, possessing, exercising, and explaining knowledge differ; when representations can guide understanding and when their form becomes an obstacle; how different kinds of cause contribute to explaining order and goodness; how inherited standards can be preserved while still permitting justified correction or revision; and how attachment, desire, and education reshape what a person recognizes and acts on as good.

This work treats the dialogues as philosophically demanding arguments rather than as components of a single predetermined Platonic system. Cross-dialogue comparison is used to identify distinctions, tensions, and cumulative questions while preserving differences in argumentative purpose and dramatic setting. Individual projects include work on expertise and statesmanship, dialectical division, knowledge and explanation, representation, moral formation, and the Protagoras. A continuing Protagoras project examines the philosophical significance of interpreting an absent poet within a dialogue otherwise structured by questioning, answerability, and direct examination of living speakers.

Music and understanding

This developing inquiry asks what listening and performance can make intelligible when descriptive propositions do not exhaust the understanding involved. Music provides a concrete setting for examining the relations among affect, experience, practical skill, and understanding.

Nathan is interested in how a listener or performer grasps musical structure, recognizes expressive possibilities, and responds within improvisation. The questions include what can be identified, corrected, or carried from one musical setting to another. Feeling something, performing skillfully, and knowing something make different demands. The research explores these distinctions without treating the force of a musical experience as sufficient evidence of knowledge or metaphysical disclosure.

Political theory and political economy

Nathan's secondary research concerns collective agency and effective control: who can make, refuse, enforce, or revise decisions about work and shared resources. It examines labor, ownership, participation, and worker self-management, with particular attention to the difference between formal institutional arrangements and the power people can exercise.

Historical case research, including Yugoslav self-management, supports questions about institutional authority, coordination, and domination. A recurring concern is how collective decision-making can endure when organizations develop their own managerial, bureaucratic, or political centers of control. The work also examines how political transformation can preserve participation and the agency of the people it claims to represent. The cases inform comparison and criticism; their differences and unresolved interpretations remain part of the inquiry.