Richard Sorabji

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sir Richard Rustom Kharsedji Sorabji (born November 8, 1934 in Oxford ) is a British historian of philosophy for the philosophy of antiquity and professor emeritus of philosophy at King's College London , who is particularly known for his research into Aristotle and its reception in antiquity.

Life

Sorabji is the son of an Indian father and an English mother. After attending the Dragon School in Oxford and the Charterhouse School , he did two years of military service. He then attended from 1955 to 1959 on a scholarship (Cutler-Boulter Scholarship) to Pembroke College , where he earned his degrees in Greek and Latin literature (1957) and in 'Literae Humaniores' (1959). Subsequently, Sorabji taught at the Dragon School for some time before completing his B.Phil. (Habilitation) under Gwil Owen and John Ackrill .

Sorabji found his first academic position in 1962 at Cornell University . In 1968 he became an associate professor while also serving as editor of the Philosophical Review . In 1970 he moved to King's College London , where he was appointed professor of ancient philosophy in 1981. Here his work on Aristotle began with his first book Aristotle on Memory (1972) and the co-edition of a four-volume edition with articles on Aristotle (1975 to 1979). In the 1980s he mainly dealt with the ancient philosophy of physics and published a trilogy on this with the titles Necessity, Cause and Blame (1980), Time, Creation, and the Continuum (1983), and Matter, Space, and Motion (1988).

Sorabji was President of the Aristotelian Society in 1985 and 1986 . In 1987 he founded the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle Project , in which mostly Greek texts of ancient philosophy from the period 200 to 600 AD were translated into English. Most of them are ancient commentaries on the work of Aristotle. By 2012 the book series had reached 100 titles, to which Sorabji has written a series of introductions. He has also published a general introduction to the book series. In 1989 he became a member of the British Academy . To bring philosophy to a wider public, he founded the King's College Center for Philosophical Studies between 1989 and 1991 . Sorabji was Director of the Institute of Classical Studies from 1991 to 1996 and British Academy Research Professor at Oxford from 1996 to 1999. In 1996 and 1997 he gave the Gifford Lectures , published in 2000 under the title Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation .

Sorabji became a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997 and was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1999 for his contribution to the study of ancient philosophy . After his retirement in 2000, Sorabji accepted the position of professor of rhetoric at Gresham College . He also taught at the University of Texas at Austin and New York University . He is an honorary member of Wolfson College and continues to work as a research fellow at King's College. In 2014 he was knighted for his scientific merits . Also in 2014 he was elected to the Academia Europaea .

Fonts

  • Aristotle on Memory , 1972
  • Necessity, Cause and Blame , 1980
  • Time, creation and the continuum: theories in antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Cornell University Press, Ithaca (New York) 1983.
  • Matter, Space and Motion , 1988
  • Animal Minds and Human Morals , 1993
  • Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation , 2000
  • Self. Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death , 2005
  • Opening Doors: The Untold Story of Cornelia Sorabji , 2010
  • The Stoics and Gandhi: Modern Experiments on Ancient Values , 2012
  • Perception, Conscience and Will in Ancient Philosophy , 2013
  • Moral Conscience through the Ages: Fifth Century BCE to the Present , 2014
as editor
  • Articles on Aristotle , with Jonathan Barnes and Malcolm Schofield, Volume 1: Science, Volume 2: Ethics and Politics, Volume 3: Metaphysics, Volume 4: Psychology and Aesthetics (1975-79)
  • Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science , 1987; 2nd, expanded edition 2008
  • Aristotle Transformed , 1990; 2nd, expanded edition with a new introduction 2016
  • Aristotle and After , 1997
  • with Robert W. Sharples , The Philosophy of the Commentators, 200–600 AD A Sourcebook (3 volumes)
  • with David Rodin, The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions , 2006

literature

  • Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers (2005), vol. 2, 980-983.
  • Peter Brown : Review of: Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation , in: Philosophical Books 43 (2002) 185–208.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ For the biography see the 'Intellectual Autobiography' in his Festschrift , ed. by R. Salles: Metaphysics, Soul and Ethics in Ancient Thought , Oxford 2005, 1–36
personal data
SURNAME Sorabji, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sorabji, Richard Rustom Kharsedji (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH November 8, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Oxford