Michael Frede Explained

Region:	Western philosophy
Era:	Contemporary philosophy
Michael Frede
Birth Date:	31 May 1940
Birth Place:	Berlin, Germany
Death Place:	Agios Minas, Greece
Main Interests:	Ancient philosophy
Influenced:	Michael Forster

Michael Frede (pronounced as /de/; 31 May 1940 – 11 August 2007) was a prominent scholar of ancient philosophy, described by The Telegraph as "one of the most important and adventurous scholars of ancient philosophy of recent times."^[1]

Education and career

Frede earned his Ph.D. at the University of Göttingen in 1966 and worked there as an assistant (German: Wissenschaftlicher Assistent) from 1966 to 1971.

He joined the faculty of the philosophy department at University of California, Berkeley^[2] as an assistant professor (1971) and quickly rose to the status of full professor. From 1976 to 1991, he was a professor at the Princeton University Philosophy Department.^[3]

He returned to Europe in 1991 and took the chair in the history of philosophy at the University of Oxford.^[4] In 1997-8 he returned to Berkeley to lecture on free will as the 84th visiting Sather Professor of Classical Literature; the resulting book was published posthumously.^[5] He retired from Oxford in 2005 and lived in Athens, Greece, until his death in a drowning accident in 2007.

He was a Member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of both the British Academy (elected 1994)^[6] and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Selected works

• Pradikation und Existenzaussage: Platons Gebrauch von "...ist..." und "...ist nicht..." im Sophistes, 1967
• Die Stoische Logik, 1974
• Galen. Three Treatises on the Nature of Science (co-edited with Richard Walzer), 1985
• Essays in Ancient Philosophy, 1987
• Aristoteles 'Metaphysik Z': Text, Übersetzung und Kommentar, 2 vols (with Günther Patzig), 1988
• The Original Sceptics: A Controversy (co-edited with Myles Burnyeat), 1997
• Rationality in Greek Thought (co-edited with Gisela Striker), 1999
• Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (co-edited with Polymnia Athanassiadi), 2001
• Aristotle's Metaphysics Book Lambda (co-edited with David Charles), 2001^[7]
• A Free Will: origins of the notion in ancient thought (edited by A. A. Long with a foreword by David Sedley), 2011
• The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter (Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics), (co-author with Myles Burnyeat) Oxford University Press 2015^[8]

External links

• Obituary in Prolegomena, April 2008
• A full bibliography of Michael Frede's works (1962–2011)

Notes and References

1. Web site: Professor Michael Frede . The Daily Telegraph . 15 October 2007 . 8 August 2017.
2. Web site: UC Berkeley - Department of Philosophy . 2 April 2020 . https://web.archive.org/web/20081218133210/http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/ . 18 December 2008 . dead .
3. http://philosophy.princeton.edu Princeton University Department of Philosophy - Home
4. http://www.classics.ox.ac.uk/faculty/directory/buscard.asp?IDno=276 Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford
5. Web site: Death of Former Sather Professor Michael Frede - UC Berkeley Department of Classics . 1 September 2007 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20070826080521/http://classics.berkeley.edu/news/articles/story.php?id=18 . 26 August 2007 .
6. Web site: Deceased Fellows - British Academy . www.britac.ac.uk . 17 January 2022 . https://web.archive.org/web/20150716005709/http://www.britac.ac.uk/fellowship/directory/dec.cfm?member=2920 . 16 July 2015 . dead.
7. Shields . Christopher . 2002-05-11 . Review of Aristotle's Metaphysics Book Lambda . en . 1538-1617.
8. Price . A. W. . July 2016 . The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter By Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede (ed. Dominic Scott) Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. xv + 224, £30 ISBN 978-0-19-873365-2 . Philosophy . en . 91 . 3 . 450–453 . 10.1017/S0031819116000188 . 171010874 . 0031-8191.