Name Gwilym Lane | Died July 10, 1982 | |
Books Logic, Science, and Dialectic: Collected Papers in Greek Philosophy People also search for Martha Nussbaum, Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd, Ingemar During | ||
Gwilym Ellis Lane Owen (18 May 1922 – 10 July 1982), who published as G. E. L. Owen, was a British philosopher, concerned with the history of Ancient Greek philosophy. He was educated at Portsmouth Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. where his undergraduate career was interrupted by five years of military service. He became the foremost authority on Aristotle in his generation, at least in the English-speaking world.
Contents
Work
From 1973 until his death Owen was the fourth Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. An undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where after research at Durham he taught, he proceeded in 1966 to Harvard University, where his many distinguished students included Julia Annas, Gail Fine, Wilbur Knorr, Martha Nussbaum, and Nicholas P. White. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1969.
He is known particularly for his ideas on the development of Aristotle. He has been classed with J. L. Ackrill and Gregory Vlastos as influential in creating interest in the field, in the Anglo-American context. His collected papers were published posthumously under the title Logic, science and dialectic : collected papers in Greek philosophy (1986). The best account of his work is by Ackrill in Proceedings of the Brirish Academy 70 (1984), pp. 481-499.
Allegations of Sexual Assault
In an article published in 2004, philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum describes Owen as a serial sexual harasser and an alcoholic, who harassed many women. This lengthy account is somewhat misleadingly summarized by Rachel Aviv as if it were a personal interview. Aviv does not mention the important fact, emphasized in the article, that Owen harassed many women and that his pattern was the same with all. Aviv writes:: [After Nussbaum entered the graduate program in classics at Harvard in 1969] "When her thesis adviser, G.E. L. Owen, invited her to his office, served sherry, spoke about his life's sadness, and reached over to touch her breasts, [Nussbaum] says, she gently pushed him away, careful not to embarrass him.... 'I managed to keep my control with Owen, and I never said a hostile word.'" The real source for this material is not a personal interview, but the article by Nussbaum, "Don't Smile Too Much: Philosophy and Women in the '70's," published in Linda Martin Alcoff, ed., SINGING IN THE FIRE: STORIES OF WOMEN IN PHILOSOPHY, Routledge.