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76Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of ArtPrinceton University Press. 2007.Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from horrors. Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty to the margins, replacing them with the anemic and rarefied alternative, "aesthetic pleasure." In Only a Promise of Happiness, Alexander Nehamas reclaims beauty from its critics. He seeks to restore its place in art, to reestablish the connection…Read more
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29Review: The Return of the Beautiful: Morality, Pleasure, and the Value of Uncertainty (review)Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (4). 2000.
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36Plato on imitation and poetry in republic 10In J. M. E. Moravcsik & Philip Temko (eds.), Plato on beauty, wisdom, and the arts, Rowman & Littlefield. 1982.
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104Episteme and Logos in Plato’s Later ThoughtArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 66 (1): 11-36. 1984.
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Painting as an Art: Persons, Artists, Spectators and RolesIn J. Hopkins & A. Savile (eds.), Psychoanalysis Mind and Art, Blackwell. pp. 239--258. 1992.
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6Who Are the Philosophers of the Future? A Reading of Beyond Good and EvilIn Robert C. Solomon (ed.), Reading Nietzsche, Oup Usa. pp. 52--53. 1988.
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18Chapter NineProceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 2 (1): 275-316. 1986.
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27The Material Word: Some Theories of Language and Its LimitsPhilosophical Review 90 (1): 122. 1981.
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27La théorie platonicienne de La Doxa (review)International Studies in Philosophy 16 (3): 91-93. 1984.
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92Richard Shusterman on pleasure and aesthetic experienceJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1): 49-51. 1998.
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12From the Many to the One: A Study of Personality and Views of Human Nature in the Context of Ancient Greek Society, Values, and BeliefsPhilosophical Review 82 (3): 395. 1973.
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31The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to FoucaultPhilosophical Review 109 (3): 423. 2000.From his own day to the present Socrates has presented a challenge to philosophers and commentators, a challenge at once of a puzzle to be solved and of an ideal to be continually reshaped in response to the demands of shifting historical perspectives. Alexander Nehamas’s intriguing book combines discussion of this ongoing process, specifically of responses to Socrates by Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault, with exemplification of it via his own response to Socrates. The focus of these responses…Read more
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137Virtues of Authenticity, Essays on Plato and Socrates (review)Philosophical Inquiry 32 (1-2): 127-130. 2010.The eminent philosopher and classical scholar Alexander Nehamas presents here a collection of his most important essays on Plato and Socrates. The papers are unified in theme by the idea that Plato's central philosophical concern in metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics was to distinguish the authentic from the fake, the original from its imitations. In approach, the collection displays Nehamas's characteristic combination of analytical rigor and sensitivity to the literary form and dramatic effec…Read more
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65Art, Interpretation, and the Rest of LifeProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 78 (2). 2004.
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202?Only in the contemplation of beauty is human life worth living? Plato, symposium 211dEuropean Journal of Philosophy 15 (1). 2007.
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28Nietzsche as self-made manPhilosophy and Literature 20 (2): 487-491. 1996.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nietzsche as Self-Made ManAlexander NehamasComposing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology, by Graham Parkes; xiv & 481 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, $37.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.I cannot resist beginning this essay on Graham Parkes’s study of Nietzsche’s psychology with the first-person pronoun. Parkes provides an erudite and suggestive presentation of Nietzsche’s views on the soul, according to which what we c…Read more
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218Self-Predication and Plato's Theory of FormsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 16 (2). 1979.This paper offers an interpretation of self-Predication (the idea that justice is just) in plato, Given that self-Predication is accepted as obvious both by plato and by his audience, Which entails that "all" self-Predications are clearly, Though not trivially, True. More strongly, It is suggested that "only" self-Predications can be accepted as clearly true by plato. This is to deny that plato had at his disposal an articulated notion of predication, And his middle theory of forms, Primarily th…Read more
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10IntroductionIn David J. Furley & Alexander Nehamas (eds.), Aristotle's Rhetoric: Philosophical Essays, Princeton University Press. 2015.
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187Eristic, Antilogic, Sophistic, Dialectic: Plato's Demarcation of Philosophy from SophistryHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 7 (1). 1990.
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110Predication and Forms of Opposites in the "Phaedo"Review of Metaphysics 26 (3). 1973.The Phaedo, despite the central role which the theory of Forms occupies there, gives us little explicit information. We meet with stock examples and with generalizations like "everything which belongs to being", "everything to which we give the mark of ‘that which is’ in our discussions", "all this sort of being". Socrates postulates the existence of the beautiful itself, the good itself, the large itself, and "all the rest", and he explains the beauty of beautiful things by appealing to their p…Read more
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62What Did Socrates Teach and to Whom Did He Teach It?Review of Metaphysics 46 (2). 1992.A LARGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE, ancient and modern alike, have always found in Socrates what seemed to them a suspicious, if not actually repugnant, aspect. This aspect, to put the point first in crude terms, is his devotion to philosophy, which presupposes an apparently unshakable faith in reason, in the power of understanding to secure goodness, and in the power of goodness to provide us with happiness.
Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
History of Western Philosophy |
Philosophical Traditions |