Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities
Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature
Princeton University

“Only in the Contemplation of Beauty Is Human Life Worth Living”
(Plato, Symposium 211d)

“I am an aesthete; that is the one ‘sin’ I confess to. If I do have a public message, it is that aesthetic facts—beauty, style and elegance, grace and connectedness—are crucial to life.”

— Alexander Nehamas in an interview with David Carrier in Bomb Magazine, 1998

Alexander Nehamas is an internationally known philosopher whose broad range of scholarly interests include classical Greek philosophy, aesthetics, and literary theory. Recently he has addressed the question of why beauty has been discredited as a philosophical notion and has championed aesthetic values. He is author of Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates (1999) and Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985), which is considered a classic, as well as translator of Plato’s Symposium (1989) and Phaedrus (1995). Nehamas is particularly interested in Nietzsche’s integration of life and philosophy in the creation of self, which he calls the “art of living.” He links this philosophical practice to a model that comes from classical Greece, and in his book The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (1998) he examines the influence of this Socratic tradition on later philosophers, including Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault.