Alexander Nehamas
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Alexander Nehamas (Template:Lang-el; born 1946) is Professor of Philosophy and Edmund N. Carpenter, II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He works on Greek philosophy, aesthetics, Nietzsche, Foucault, and literary theory.
He was born in Athens, Greece in 1946. In 1964, he enrolled to Swarthmore College. He graduated in 1967 and completed his doctorate on Predication in Plato's Phaedo under the direction of Gregory Vlastos at Princeton in 1971. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pennsylvania before joining the Princeton faculty in 1990.
His early work was on Platonic metaphysics and aesthetics as well as the philosophy of Socrates, but he gained a wider audience with his 1985 book Nietzsche: Life as Literature, which argued that Nietzsche thought of life and the world on the model of a literary text. Nehamas has said, "The virtues of life are comparable to the virtues of good writing—style, connectedness, grace, elegance—and also, we must not forget, sometimes getting it right." More recently, he has become well known for his view that philosophy should provide a form of life, as well as for his endorsement of the artistic value of television. In 2008, he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh.
Selected works
- Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1985)
- Symposium (translation, with Paul Woodruff) (1989)
- The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (1998)
- Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates (1999)
- The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault: University of California Press (2000)
- Only A Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (2008)
- “the only reaction appropriate to beauty is eros—love, the desire to possess it”
