Michael Frede


Michael Frede was a prominent scholar of ancient philosophy, described by The Telegraph as "one of the most important and adventurous scholars of ancient philosophy of recent times."

Education and career

Frede earned his Ph.D. at the University of Göttingen in 1966 and worked there as an assistant from 1966 to 1971.
He joined the faculty of the philosophy department at University of California, Berkeley as an assistant professor and quickly rose to the status of full professor. From 1976 to 1991, he was a professor at the Princeton University Philosophy Department.
He returned to Europe in 1991 and took the chair in the history of philosophy at the University of Oxford. In 1997-8 he returned to Berkeley to lecture on free will as the 84th visiting Sather Professor of Classical Literature; the resulting book was published posthumously. He retired from Oxford in 2005 and lived in Athens, Greece, until his death in a drowning accident in 2007.
He was a Member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of both the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Selected works

  • Pradikation und Existenzaussage: Platons Gebrauch von "...ist..." und "...ist nicht..." im Sophistes, 1967
  • Die Stoische Logik, 1974
  • Galen. Three Treatises on the Nature of Science, 1985
  • Essays in Ancient Philosophy, 1987
  • Aristoteles 'Metaphysik Z': Text, Übersetzung und Kommentar, 2 vols, 1988
  • The Original Sceptics: A Controversy, 1997
  • Rationality in Greek Thought, 1999
  • Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, 2001
  • Aristotle's Metaphysics Book Lambda, 2001
  • A Free Will: origins of the notion in ancient thought, 2011
  • The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter , Oxford University Press 2015