Thomas A. Szlezák

Thomas Alexander Szlezak (born 1940) studied classical philology, philosophy, and history at the Universities of Erlangen, Munich, and Tübingen (1959-1967). He earned his doctorate from the Technical University of Berlin (1969) with a dissertation on the late Aristotelian commentary literature ("Pseudo-Archytas on the Categories. Texts on Greek Aristotelian Exegesis," 1972). He became a lecturer at the University of Zurich (1976) with his work "Plato and Aristotle in Plotinus' Doctrine of Nous" (1979), which systematically analyzes for the first time from a philological perspective the method Plotinus follows in the philosophical interpretation of the "classics": Plato and Aristotle. After a long period of research and teaching at the University of Zurich, he became a professor of classical philology at the University of Würzburg (1983). In 1985, his book "Plato and the Writtenness of Philosophy" was published: the interpretations provided there for the early and middle dialogues show that the prevailing notion, according to which Platonic works are self-sufficient (and therefore do not require any supplementation from Plato's oral philosophy), is contradicted by the Platonic text itself; this conclusion radically changed the debate of recent decades regarding Plato's unwritten philosophy concerning the "principles." The work was also published in Italian translation (Milan 1989, 1992). In Italy, the book "Reading Plato" was also published for the first time (Milan, 1991, 1992). Szlezak's research interests also include 5th-century ancient Greek tragedy and Aristotelian "metaphysics." In recent years, a series of related articles and book reviews have been published. Since 1990, Szlezak has been teaching at the University of Tübingen.