The 2022 SAGP Distinguished Lectureship

Abstract: At the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle invokes the need for a master-science (‘most architectonic’) that determines the good human life in a community by providing for its order and laws. Though the master-scientist somewhat recedes afterwards, his art, legislation, is not forgotten. It not only reemerges in the EN’s final chapter, but plays a major role in the construction of the city of Aristotle’s prayers in Politics VII. The paper will elucidate the specifications of this art and its compatibility with Aristotle’s apparent preference for a purely theoretical form of life.

Dorothea Frede, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Hamburg University, is an internationally renowned scholar of ancient Greek philosophy. Since receiving her PhD at Göttingen University, she has held positions at universities around at the world, including Swarthmore College, University of California Berkeley, and Hamburg University. Her most influential publications include Aristoteles und die Seeschlacht (Göttingen 1970), Plato Philebus, translated with introduction & notes (Indianapolis 1993), Platon Philebos, Übersetzung mit Commentar (Göttingen 1997), and Aristoteles Nikomachische Ethik, Übersetzung und Kommentar (Berlin 2020). She has also published many articles and collections of articles on Plato, Aristotle, the Hellenistic philosophers, and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. She is a member of the Göttingen Academy of Science and Foreign Fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences.