Stanley Rosen

Stanley Rosen (born July 29, 1929) is an American philosopher. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he is currently a University Professor at Boston University. His wide range of research includes metaphysics, political philosophy, and history of western philosophy.

Rosen was a student of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, where he defended his dissertation on Spinoza in 1955. He was also a student of Alexandre Kojève. He did his postdoctoral work at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and became Evan Pugh Professor of philosophy at Penn State University and then Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. He has held the Companys Lectureship at the University of Barcelona, the Cardinal Mercier Lectureship at Louvain University, the Priestley Lectureship at the University of Toronto, and the Gilson Lectureship at the Institut Catholique in Paris. Rosen is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Department of Social Sciences.

Rosen has contributed a number of highly relevant analyses of Strauss, including "Hermeneutics as Politics"—a book similar in structure to Robert B. Pippin's "Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations". In this work, Rosen asserts that Strauss was a "pagan," an "atheist," and "almost a Nietzschean, but closer in the roots of his thought to Kant," that Strauss "Nietzscheanized the classics," that Strauss and Kojève liked to be called "God," and Strauss declared himself to be a god on French television, and that each in his own way created a world in his own image.

He also implies enigmatically that Strauss' work "Socrates and Aristophanes" is in a way dedicated to some dark purpose as he also suggests that Kojève employed the thought of Dostoevsky to some dark purpose in the French versions of his "An Introduction to the Reading of Hegel" and "Tyranny and Wisdom." In one of Rosen's most recent publications, he remarks that Strauss (while he taught at the University of Chicago) was teaching his students that "Philosophy had not even begun yet." This should, perhaps, be interpreted in light of Rosen's book on Plato's "Republic"—and especially in reference to his assessment of Strauss' ambivalent claim that the "Republic" is to be taken as a comedy, not as a serious political proposal.

Bibliography (published text)

*"Plato's Republic: A Study" (Yale University Press, 2005)
*"The Mask of Enlightenment": Nietzsche's Zarathustra, 2nd edition (Yale University Press, 2004)
*"Hermeneutics as Politics", 2nd edition (Yale University Press, 2003)
*"The Elusiveness of the Ordinary" (Yale University Press, 2002)
*"Metaphysics in Ordinary Language" (Yale University Press, 1999)
*"The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra" (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
*"Plato's Statesman: The Web of Politics" (Yale University Press, 1995)
*"The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger" (Yale University Press, 1993)
*"The Ancients and the Moderns" (Yale University Press, 1989)
*"The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry" (Routledge, 1988)
*"Hermeneutics as Politics" (Oxford University Press, 1987)
*"Plato's Sophist" (Yale University Press, 1983)
*"The Limits of Analysis" (Basic Books, 1980)
*"G. W. F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom" (Yale University Press, 1974)
*"Nihilism: a Philosophical Essay" (Yale University Press, 1969)
*"Plato's Symposium" (Yale University Press, 1967)

See also, "Logos and Eros: Essays Honoring Stanley Rosen" (St. Augustine's Press, 2006)

External links

* [http://www.bu.edu/uni/faculty/profiles/rosen.html Boston University University program page]
* [http://www.bu.edu/philo/faculty/rosen.html Boston University Department of Philosophy page]