F M Cornford

Updated on Oct 12, 2024

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Name F. Cornford Role Poet		Spouse Frances Cornford

Died January 3, 1943, Cambridge Children John Cornford, Christopher Cornford, Helena Cornford, Clare Cornford, Hugh Wordsworth Cornford Grandchildren Matthew Chapman, James Cornford, Adam Cornford Books From Religion to Philosop, Before and After Socrates, Thucydides Mythistoricus, The Origin of Attic Comedy, The Unwritten Philosop Similar People Frances Cornford, John Cornford, Jane Ellen Harrison, Francis Darwin, Gilbert Murray

Francis Macdonald Cornford, FBA (27 February 1874 – 3 January 1943) was an English classical scholar and translator; because of the similarity of his forename to his wife's, he was known to family as "FMC" and his wife Frances as "FCC".

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Academia

Cornford was educated at St Paul's School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a Fellow from 1899 and held a teaching post from 1902. He became Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy in 1931 and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1937.

Family

In 1909 Cornford married the poet Frances Darwin, daughter of Sir Francis Darwin and Ellen Wordsworth Darwin, née Crofts, and a granddaughter of Charles Darwin. They had five children:

Helena (1913–1994), married Joseph L. Henderson in 1934.

John (1915–1936), poet and Communist who was killed in the Spanish Civil War.

Christopher (1917–1993), artist and writer; the father of Adam Cornford

Hugh Wordsworth (1921–1997), medical doctor

Ruth Clare (1923–1992), the mother of Matthew Chapman

He was cremated at Cambridge Crematorium on 6 January 1943.

Works

Thucydides Mythistoricus (1907) argued that Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War was informed by Thucydides' tragic view.

From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation (1912) sought the deep religious and social concepts that informed the early Greek philosophers. He returned to this in Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought (posthumous, 1952).

Microcosmographia Academica (1908), an insider's satire on academic politics, was the source of catch phrases such as the "doctrine of unripeness of time", "principle of the wedge", and "principle of the dangerous precedent".

According to the preface to The Republic of Plato, translated with an introduction and notes (OUP, 1941), it "aims at conveying... as much as possible of the thought of the Republic in the most convenient and least misleading form."

References

F. M. Cornford Wikipedia

(Text) CC BY-SA

Contents

Academia

Family

Works

References