Abstract

G.E.L. Owen was, with Harold Cherniss and Gregory Vlastos, the most influential scholar of Greek philosophy in the English-speaking world since the War. Of the three his views were, in their time, the most controversial. And if it seems today to be uncontroversial that Plato's thought grew and matured and even altered throughout his career, that Aristotle was not a monolithic system builder committed to explaining everything by means of a small, favored set of principles, and that Aristotle was never a Platonist, an adherent of Plato's theory of Forms, not even at the outset of his career, this is in no small measure due to the degree of acceptance of Owen's views. Owen's essays, collected here in their entirety, are required reading for anyone seriously working in Greek philosophy.