Alexander Nehamas

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Alexander Nehamas (born 1946) is Professor of philosophy and Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. He works on Greek philosophy, aesthetics, Nietzsche, Foucault, and literary theory. He graduated from Swarthmore College 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. He is currently the Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities.

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. 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 will deliver the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh.

[edit] Works

Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Literature (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)
Only A Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (2007)