Alexander Nehamas

Alexander Nehamas ( Αλέξανδρος Νεχαμάς, born March 22, 1946 in Athens ) is a professor of philosophy and comparative literature, who currently teaches at Princeton University. His main research interests are the Greek philosophy - especially Socrates and Plato - Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault as well as aesthetics and literary theory. Nehamas has Spanish citizenship but lives and works in the USA.

Nehamas graduated from Swarthmore College in 1967 with a Bachelor of Arts and a Ph.D. in 1971 at Princeton under Gregory Vlastos on Plato's Phaedo ( Predication and the Theory of Forms in the Phaedo ). He then taught until 1986 at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was professor of philosophy in 1981, and from 1986 to 1990 at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1990 he is a professor at Princeton.

Particularly successful was his Nietzsche book " Nietzsche: Life as Literature" from 1985, which has now been translated into nine languages ​​and had a great influence on the recent U.S. Nietzsche reception. Together with Paul Woodruff he created annotated translations of Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium. Nehamas sees philosophy as a means of living art.

Works

• Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1985 German: Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Steidl, Göttingen 1991 ( 2nd edition 1996), ISBN 3-88243-408-2

• German: The art of living. Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. Red Book Verlag, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-434-53057-6