Sarah Broadie, scholar of ancient Greek philosophy

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Peter Adamson, Sophie-Grace Chappell, Ursula Coope, Mehmet Erginel, Thomas Johansen and Barbara Sattler. I am also grateful to Sophia Connell and The British Journal for the History of Philosophy for giving me this opportunity to return to Sarah Broadie's writing and reflect on what made it so distinctive.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Since her death in August 2021 obituaries and other tributes have described not only her career and the honours with which her achievements were recognized, but also the personal qualities with which she earned respect and devotion around the world. See especially the appreciation posted by her colleagues at St Andrews here: https://sarahbroadie.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/about-sarah/.

2 In chronological order: D. N. Sedley's 1997 ‘“Becoming Like God’ in the Timaeus and Aristotle”, 330 n.4; M. F. Burnyeat's 2000 “Plato on Why Mathematics is Good for the Soul”, 59 n. 83; T. Johansen's 2004 Plato’s Natural Philosophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias, 140 n.7. My thanks to Thomas Johansen for discussion of her talk (at which I was not present) and its influence.

3 See also her “Soul and Body in Plato and Descartes”.

4 When returning to her books it is remarkable to see how she writes without any labour-saving reliance on ‘-isms’ and similar words. Her book on Aristotle’s ethics is a model of how to philosophize about Aristotle and happiness without much talk at all of ‘eudaimonism’. Compare her comment on how to discuss the separation of souls from each other and from the cosmic soul in the Timaeus: “the mythic presentation calls less for academic paraphrase by some term like ‘individuality’ (planted down and left at that), than for a detailed or concrete unravelling of what is presented, putting together Plato’s philosophical theory of the divine cosmos with what we know about human life from ordinary experience” (Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus, 96).

5 See also her brilliant chapter “The Sophists and Socrates”.