G. E. L. Owen

Gwilym Ellis Lane Owen was born in May 1922 at Portsmouth in South East England, the son of the Welshman[3] Ellis Owen and his English wife Edith Lane. His father worked as a secretary at the Portsmouth and Isle of Wight Ice and Cold Storage Company.[2] After receiving his secondary education at Portsmouth Grammar School, he went to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he began to study Classics in 1940.[3] However, the following year he was called up for military service at the Royal Corps of Signals. Having served as an intelligence officer in Siam, Burma, and India until 1946, he returned to Oxford to continue his studies.[2]

During his second stint at university, Owen became involved in the publication of The Isis Magazine, one of Oxford's student newspapers and kept company with a group of contemporaries with literary interests. His friends included the novelist Kingsley Amis, journalist Ludovic Kennedy and the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan.[2] In 1948, he graduated with a first-class Bachelor of Arts. Encouraged by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, he went on to obtain a Bachelor of Philosophy. This degree, which he completed in 1950, marked a shift in academic interest from historical topics towards philosophy.[4]

During his time as student journalist at Oxford, Owens met Sally Clothier, a student of St Hilda's College whom he married in 1947.[4] They had two sons.[2] From 1969, his wife and children lived in Oxford, while Owen spent most of the year at Harvard, returning to England only in the summers.[11]

In a 2003 book chapter, Martha Nussbaum, who had been one of Owen's doctoral students at Harvard, wrote that he had repeatedly made unwanted sexual advances towards her.[12] She also stated that Owen had a habitual procedure whereby he encouraged female graduate students to have sex with him.[12] The same chapter stated that at a later point, after his move to Cambridge, Nussbaum experienced an attempted rape at the hands of Owen.[12] These allegations were re-stated in a 2016 profile of Nussbaum by The New Yorker.[13]

His first publication, a paper on the Timaeus (1953),[14] traced how the dialogue improves the logical and argumentative underpinnings of the theory of forms introduced in the middle dialogues.[1] He thereby challenged the then orthodox view that placed the dialogue among Plato's late work.[15] Although his views on this topic have not found universal assent, they introduced, in the words of philosopher Malcolm Schofield, "revolutionary" new perspectives to the study of the Platonic corpus.[2] After editing two articles on Zeno of Elea and Parmenides respectively,[16] Owen made his first important contribution to the study of Aristotle: his 'Logic and Metaphysics in Some Early Works of Aristotle' (1960) traced the use of the term "focal meaning" in Aristotle's ontology.[17] His later time at Oxford saw publications on Aristotle's Phaenomena[18] and, again, his ontology.[19]

Among the work of his period at Harvard is a paper on theTopics ('Dialectic and Eristic in the Treatment of the Forms', 1968) in which he argued that Aristotle did not employ his dialectic method in an eristic fashion and that he instead engaged constructively with Plato's theory of forms.[20] Owen's article 'Notes on Ryle's Plato', a guide to the second half of the Parmenides, provided, in the words of philosopher J. L. Ackrill, an "extraordinary condensation of material and analysis".[21] In 1972, a paper entitled 'Aristotelian Pleasures' developed a reconciliation of two concepts of pleasures described in the Nicomachean Ethics.[22]

In his years at Cambridge, Owen reduced his publishing activity. The two papers to emerge from this period were 'Aristotle on Time' (1976), an analysis of the reality of time presented in the Physics, and 'Particular and General' (1978) on the argumentative strategies of Book 5 of the Metaphysics.[23]

Writing for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, philosopher John M. Cooper stated that Owen "led [a] reorientation in ancient philosophy that began in the 1950s in Britain and North America".[1] His central achievement, according to fellow philosopher J. D. G. Evans, was to demonstrate the importance of method and argument in classical philosophy, as opposed to mere dogmatism.[24] For Evans, Owen's approach is illustrated by the "seminal article" 'The Platonism of Aristotle' (1967). His papers, according to Schofield, provided "a new way of writing about ancient philosophy".[2]

Although his focus lay on Aristotle, Owen also made contributions to the study of Plato. His Bachelor of Philosophy thesis, a "bold and far-reaching study of logic and metaphysics" in Plato,[1] laid the foundation for future work on a group of texts which, under Owen's influence, came to be called 'later dialogues'.[1] Cooper writes that Owen "fundamentally altered, and deepened, the study of [Plato's late work]" but failed to garner universal support for his preferred, earlier dating of the Timaeus[1]

Owen was particularly noted as a mentor for graduate students during his time at Oxford and Harvard, leading Ackrill to call him an "unrivalled teacher of graduates".[10] In 1982, months before his death, a group of scholars presented Owen with a Festschrift of papers on topics in ancient philosophy. The volume, entitled Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy Presented to G. E. L. Owen, paid homage to Owen's influence as a teacher and dialectician.[9] In 1986, a collection of new and previously published papers was released posthumously under the title Logic, Science and Dialectic.[2]

Owen was elected a Fellow of the British Academy,[25] a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. He served as the president of the Aristotelian Society in the year of its centenary (1978–79) and was invited to be the 1979 Sather Professor of Classical Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Durham University awarded him an honorary doctorate.[9]

• Ackrill, John Lloyd (1985). "Gwilym Ellis Lane Owen" (PDF). Proceedings of the British Academy. 70: 481–99.
• Cooper, John M. (2002). "Owen, Gwilym Ellis Lane (1922–82)". Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISBN 978-0415223645. (subscription required)
• Evans, J. D. G. (2005). "Owen, G. E. L.". In Honderich, Ted (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (2 ed.). ISBN 978-0191727474. (subscription required)
• Montanari, Franco, ed. (2003). "G. E. L. Owen". Catalogus Philologorum Classicorum. Genoa.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Nussbaum, Martha C. (2003). ""Don't Smile so Much": Philosophy and Women in the 1970s". In Alcoff, Linda Martín (ed.). Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy. Oxford. pp. 92–204. ISBN 978-0742513822.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Schofield, Malcolm (2004). "Owen, Gwilym Ellis Lane". In Cannadine, David (ed.). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198614135. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• Schofield, Malcolm; Nussbaum, Martha C (1982). "Introduction". In Schofield, Malcolm; Nussbaum, Martha, C. (eds.). Language and Logos. Cambridge. pp. ix–xiv. ISBN 978-0511550874.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)