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Alexander Nehamas is a professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He is also Professor of the Humanities and of Comparative Literature.
He was born in 1946 in Athens. In 1964, he relocated to the United States to study economics, even though his dream was to study business. Three years later, however, he was fatally attracted to philosophy by the help of his professor Gregory Vlastos and decided to devote himself to philosophical studies as a teacher and author. Alexander Nehamas got his B.A. in 1967 with High Honors and his Ph.D. in 1971, in Princeton University.
“From my family’s point of view, I’m a failure. Greece was not and is not a country where an intellectual and academic career is considered proper. It’s all right to be cultured and educated, but you are not really supposed to live off your education. You work; it’s a mercantile society… Greece was never aristocratic in the traditional sense, where work is something you don’t dirty your hands with. It’s a bourgeois society. But when I was growing up, pieces of the culture of pre-World War I Europe were still alive there. It was a contradictory society. My parents, for example, spoke French at home, not Greek. My father was in banking. But banking is something a true aristocrat looks down on. Banking is a business, aristocrats own land” he mentioned in an interview at Bomb magazine.
His interests include Greek philosophy, philosophy of art, European philosophy and literary theory. His books include “Nietzsche: Life as Literature”, “The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault”, “Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates”, and “Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art”. He has also translated Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus into English. At Princeton, he has chaired the Council of the Humanities, the Program in Hellenic Studies, and he was the Founding Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.
The awarded Professor of the Humanities, of Philosophy and of Comparative Literature at Princeton University says that the purpose of his teaching is to make students uneasy about life and their world. The issue of his origins is complicated, because he is the son of a Christian Orthodox mother and a Jewish father of Spanish nationality, who was baptized Catholic before the war.
In past interviews, Alexander Nehamas has disclosed that even though he had taken his father’s Spanish nationality, he became a US naturalized citizen after living for decades in the country, only to gain the right to vote for Obama. However, he emphasizes that, “My homeland is Greece”.
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Alexander Nehamas was born in 1946 in Athens. In 1964, he relocated to the United States to study economics, even though his dream was to study business. Three years later, however, he was fatally attracted to philosophy by the help of his professor Gregory Vlastos and decided to devote himself to philosophical studies as a teacher and author.
The awarded Professor of the Humanities, of Philosophy and of Comparative Literature at Princeton University says that the purpose of his teaching is to make students uneasy about life and their world. The issue of his origins is complicated, because he is the son of a Christian Orthodox mother and a Jewish father of Spanish nationality, who was baptized Catholic before the war.
In past interviews, Alexander Nehamas has disclosed that even though he had taken his father’s Spanish nationality, he became a US naturalized citizen after living for decades in the country, only to gain the right to vote for Obama. However, he emphasizes that, “My homeland is Greece”.
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