Alexander Nehamas

Alexander Nehamas
Born	(1946-03-22) 22 March 1946 Athens, Greece
Alma mater	Swarthmore College (BA) Princeton University (PhD)
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental philosophy
Thesis	Predication and the Theory of Forms in the 'Phaedo' (1971)
Doctoral advisor	Gregory Vlastos
Doctoral students	Bernard Reginster
Main interests	Ancient Greek philosophy, comparative literature, aesthetics

Alexander Nehamas (Greek: Αλέξανδρος Νεχαμάς; born 22 March 1946) is a Greek-born American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy and comparative literature and the Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1990. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and Member of the American Philosophical Society (since 2016), the Academy of Athens since 2018. He works on Greek philosophy, aesthetics, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and literary theory.

Biography

Nehamas was born in Athens, Greece in 1946. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1967 and completed his doctorate (titled Predication and the Theory of Forms in the Phaedo) under the direction of Gregory Vlastos at Princeton University in 1971. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pennsylvania before joining the Princeton faculty in 1990.

Philosophical work

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 (Harvard University Press), in which he 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. This view also becomes evident in his book Only a Promise of Happiness. The title itself is later in this work used as one definition of beauty with reference to Stendhal. In that sense, beauty can be found in all media; as Nehamas claims in the same work: "Aesthetic features are everywhere, but that has nothing to do with where the arts can be found. Works of art can be beautiful because everything can be beautiful, but that doesn't mean that anything can be a work of art."

In 2016, Nehamas published a book, On Friendship, based on his 2008 Gifford Lectures. In it, he argues, contra Aristotle, that friendship is an aesthetic, but not always moral or good. In a manner similar to his earlier work, Only a Promise of Happiness, Nehamas compares the relationship of an individual to friends as having similarities to the relationship which an individual can have to artworks. “Like metaphors and works of art, the people who matter to us are all, so far as we are concerned, inexhaustible. They always remain a step beyond the furthest point our knowledge of them has reached—though only if, and as long as, they still matter to us.”

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)
• Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (2007)
• On Friendship (2016)

External links

• Nehamas' page at the Princeton department of philosophy
• List of articles (in Greek)
• "An Essay on Beauty and Judgment"
• Nehamas interviewed on Friendship for Philosophy Bites podcast
• Audio of Alexander Nehamas's lecture "Only in the Contemplation of Beauty Is Human Life Worth Living" at the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities on Nov 17, 2005.
• Review of Nehamas' book Only A Promise of Happiness in the New York Sun Archived 2022-03-10 at the Wayback Machine
• Art, Interpretation And The Rest Of Life
• The Gifford Lectures 2008
• Interview in Greek daily Kathimerini (February 13, 2011) on the occasion of Nehamas' award of an honorary doctoral degree at the School of Fine Arts of Athens University (in Greek)
• Audio of An interview with Alexander Nehamas on Beauty with Joshua Landy on February 15, 2011.