OWEN, G. E. L
(1922–1982)

Gwilym Ellis Lane Owen was a major force in the post–World War II upsurge of analytically oriented philosophical work on ancient philosophy. The author of articles of enduring value, the subject of much discussion and controversy, many of them among the classics of the philosophical study of pre-Socratic philosophy, Plato, and Aristotle, he was concerned principally with the logic of argument, metaphysics, and philosophy of language; he had no substantive interests in ethics, political theory, or aesthetics. He understood the ancient philosophers as engaged in conceptual investigations of live philosophical interest. Raised in a Welsh family in Portsmouth, England, he matriculated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1940, completing his bachelor of arts degree in 1948, after war service in the Pacific arena. In 1950 he received a bachelor of philosophy degree under Gilbert Ryle's supervision, with an epoch-making thesis on logic, philosophy of language, and metaphysics in Plato's Theaetetus, Parmenides, Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus. Its main ideas formed the basis of his influential, though controversial, first publication, "The Place of the Timaeus in Plato's Dialogues."

After postdoctoral research at the University of Durham, Owen returned to Oxford in 1953 as university lecturer in ancient philosophy (from 1958, also nontutorial fellow of Corpus Christi), university reader (1957), and professor of ancient philosophy as first incumbent of that chair (1963). In 1966 he went to Harvard as professor of philosophy and the classics to direct a new PhD program in classical philosophy. In 1973 he returned to Great Britain as Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy in the Classics Faculty at Cambridge, and as fellow of King's College, where he remained until his early death in 1982.

Owen's year-long Oxford lectures on pre-Socratic philosophy, and his courses and seminars on Plato and Aristotle throughout his career, were famously exhilarating, challenging, and fast-paced explorations of central texts and topics in the study of ancient philosophy. A remarkably high percentage of the leading ancient philosophers of the next generation learned their craft and drew their initial inspiration from these classes. More than any of his contemporaries, Owen's example and personal influence shaped the growth and expansion in the philosophical study of ancient philosophy in the late twentieth century.

More than half of Owen's published work concerned Aristotle primarily, but his work on Plato and the pre-Socratic philosophers Parmenides and Zeno of Elea was equally ground breaking. He rejected the traditional idea that Plato's Timaeus —with its conception of the physical world as a "copy" drawn by a creator god from his intellectual vision of Forms existing in a separate nonphysical realm—was the culmination and permanent legacy of Plato's work in metaphysics. Rather, he read the dialectical and logical investigations of the Parmenides and Sophist, and others of what under his influence came to be referred to simply as the "late" dialogues, as containing deeper and more adequate reflections on issues of being and not-being, unity and multiplicity, becoming and change.

Confused ideas about these issues had motivated the "middle-period" theory of Forms, of Symposium, Phaedo, Republic, and Timaeus. Owen argued that Timaeus was in fact composed, not, as traditionally assumed, toward the end of Plato's life, but rather as a premature copestone to the middle-period theory, which was to be undermined and reconsidered in the "late" dialogues. His influential essays, "Notes on Ryle's Plato" and "Plato on Not-Being," dealing respectively with Parmenides and Sophist, cast new light on these intriguing but very obscure works, and spearheaded a generation of subsequent scholarly and philosophical work on them. His essays "Eleatic Questions," "Zeno and the Mathematicians," and "Plato and Parmenides on the Timeless Present" had a similar effect on studies of Parmenides and Zeno.

Owen's work on Aristotle concentrated on logic, methodology, physics, and metaphysics, but included one provocative paper on "Aristotelian Pleasures." This investigates Aristotle's idea that pleasure is to be conceived not as a passive experience but is itself an activity. Owen advanced the challenging thesis that Aristotle's two discussions of pleasure in Nicomachean Ethics VII and X have interestingly divergent conceptions of the relationship between the activity that pleasure itself is and whatever one takes pleasure in. In "Logic and Metaphysics in some Earlier Works of Aristotle" he paid careful attention to logical and philosophical details in some of Aristotle's earliest works and showed that the then popular picture of Aristotle's development (due to Werner Jaeger) was unacceptable. Far from only gradually freeing himself from a committed belief in a universal science of being, gained through the knowledge of middle-period Platonic Forms, Aristotle began by rejecting both the existence of such Forms and the possibility of any universal science of being.

It was only much later, with the employment of what Owen called a theory of "focal meaning" for being, that Aristotle could reconcile himself to any general science of being, or metaphysics. It was, however, the being of Aristotelian substances, not Platonic Forms, which provided the linchpin and focus of that science. In "The Platonism of Aristotle" and "Particular and General," he carried this analysis forward, finding in the middle books of Aristotle's Metaphysics an avowed sympathy with Plato's general metaphysical program—with Aristotelian forms, not Platonic Forms, at the center of the enterprise. Other well-known papers proposed an influential analysis of the "appearances" that Aristotle notoriously made the basis for the use of dialectical inquiry in physics, ethics, and other areas of philosophy ("Tithenai ta phainomena "), and argued that in his theory of categories Aristotle countenanced nonrepeatable individuals only in the category of substance. In other categories the "individuals" were such things as specific, narrowest shades of colors, not color-instances possessed uniquely by individual substances ("Inherence"). His paper "Aristotle on Time" also generated much discussion.

Owen was a moving force for the founding in 1957 of the Symposium Aristotelicum, a triennial select meeting of British, European, and North American scholars for concentrated joint study of a single Aristotelian text or topic. These meetings have done much to bring the diverse national traditions of Aristotelian scholarship into mutual communication. Several of Owen's articles originally appeared in the Symposium's triennial volumes. Many of his papers were reprinted in collections too numerous to list. After his death, they were all published together in 1986 (as Collected Papers ); details of the original and other prior publications can be found there.

See also Aristotle; Parmenides of Elea; Philosophy of Language; Plato; Pre-Socratic Philosophy; Ryle, Gilbert; Zeno of Elea.

Bibliography

works by g. e. l. owen

"The Place of the Timaeus in Plato's Dialogues." Classical Quarterly NS 3 (1953): 79–95.

"Zeno and the Mathematicians." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 58 (1957–1958): 199–222.

"Eleatic Questions." Classical Quarterly NS 10 (1960): 84–102.

"Logic and Metaphysics in some Earlier Works of Aristotle." In Aristotle and Plato in the Mid-Fourth Century, edited by Ingemar Düring and G. E. L. Owen, 163–190. Göteborg, Sweden: Elanders Boktryckeri, 1960.

"Tithenai ta phainomena." In Aristote et les problèmes de méthode, edited by S. Mansion, 83–103. Louvain, Belgium: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1961.

"Inherence." Phronesis 10 (1965): 97–105.

"Plato and Parmenides on the Timeless Present." The Monist 50 (1966): 317–340.

"The Platonism of Aristotle." Proceedings of the British Academy 51 (1966): 125–150.

"Notes on Ryle's Plato." In Ryle, edited by O. P. Wood and George Pitcher, 341–372. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970.

"Plato on Not-Being." In Plato I, edited by G. Vlastos, 223–267. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970.

"Aristotelian Pleasures." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 72 (1971–1972): 135–152.

"Particular and General." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 79 (1978–1979): 1–21.

Logic, Science, and Dialectic: Collected Papers in Greek Philosophy. Edited by Martha C. Nussbaum. London: Duckworth, 1986.

John M. Cooper (2005)