Life and Works
Vlastos was born in Istanbul, to a Scottish mother and a Greek father, where he received a Bachelor of Arts from Robert College before moving to Harvard University where he received a PhD in 1931. After teaching for several years at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, he moved to Cornell University in 1948. He was Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University between 1955 and 1976, and then Mills Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Berkeley until 1987. He received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1990. He was twice awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Vlastos died in 1991, before finishing a new compilation of essays on Socratic philosophy.
He is credited with bringing about a renaissance of interest in Plato among philosophers throughout the world. Many of Vlastos' students have become important scholars of ancient philosophy, including Terence Irwin, Richard Kraut, Frank A. Lewis, Paul Woodruff, Sara Ahbel-Rappe, and Alexander Nehamas.
Read more about this topic: Gregory Vlastos
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or works:
“Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.”
—William Barrett (b. 1913)
“We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law.”
—Bible: New Testament, Galatians 2:15-16.