3 Quotes & Sayings By Alexander Nehamas

Alexander Nehamas is the Helen W. and Walter J. Currie, Jr. Professor of Humanities at New York University Read more

His work focuses on the history of philosophy, especially the history of Platonism and the Platonic tradition in art, literature, and politics. He has published widely in journals including Diacritics, History of European Ideas, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Journal of Hellenic Studies, History of Political Thought, Mnemosyne, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, and The American Historical Review. He is currently editing the Diels-Kranz collection for Oxford University Press.

1
I will tell you why I became a philosopher. I became a philosopher because I wanted to be able to talk about many, many things, ideally with knowledge, but sometimes not quite the amount of knowledge that I would need if I were to be a specialist in them. It allows you to be many different things. And plurality and complexity are very, very important to me. Alexander Nehamas
2
Just as we can’t fully explain what is beautiful, so we can’t fully explain why we are friends with someone in a way that will make the grounds of our attraction obvious to another – and even to ourselves. Our efforts always leave something out. And it is what is always left out that we try to gesture toward when we say that it is not something ABOUT our friends that we love but our friends THEMSELVES. But the self that we love is always just one one step behind whatever we can actually articulate. And so we are faced with a choice between saying something that seems informative but is never enough of an explanation ('loyal, practical, unworldly and so on') and saying something else that seems like an explanation but is completely uninformative ('the individual, in the uniqueness and integrity of his or her individuality'). Alexander Nehamas