All Scholars

BENARDETE, Seth Gabriel

  • Date of Birth: April 4, 1930
  • Born City: New York
  • Born State/Country: New York
  • Parents: Mercedes Mair Meir J. & Doris Fox B.
  • Date of Death: November 14, 2001
  • Death City: New York
  • Death State/Country: New York
  • Married: Malonie “Jane” Johnson, 1960
  • Education:

    B.A., U. of Chicago, 1949; M.A., 1953; Ph.D., 1955.
  • Dissertation:

    “Achilles and Hector: the Homeric Hero” (U. of Chicago, 1956).
  • Professional Experience:

    Teaching Intern, St. John’s College (MD), 1955-7; jr. fellow, Harvard, 1957-60; asst. prof. Greek & Latin, Brandeis, 1960-5; assoc. prof., NYU, 1965-76; prof. classics, 1976- vis lectr. Philosophy, Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research, 1965-2001  Sr, fellow, NEH, 1972.
  • Publications:

    The Suppliant Maidens, The Persians (trans.) in Aeschylus II, ed. with David Grene, in The Complete Greek Tragedies ed. David Grene & Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1956);  n “Plato Sophist 223b 1-7,” Phronesis 5 (1960) 129-39; “Vat. Gr. 2181: An Unknown Aristophanes Ms.,” HSCP 66 (1962) 241-8; “The Right, the True, and the Beautiful,” Glotta 41 (1963) 54-62; “Some Misquotations of Homer in Plato,” Phronesis 18 (1963) 173-8; “Eidos and diaeresis in Plato's Statesman,” Philologus 107 (1963) 193-226; “Achilles and the Iliad,” Hermes 91 (1963) 1-16; “The Crimes and Arts of Prometheus,” RhM 107 (1964) 126-39; “ΧΡΗ and ΔΕΙ in Plato and Others,”Glotta 43 (1965) 285-98; “Two Notes on Aeschylus Septem, I,” WS 80 (1967) 22-30; “Hesiod's Works and Days: A First Reading,” Agon 1 (1967) 150-74; “The aristeia of Diomedes and the Plot of the Iliad,” Agon 1 (1968) 10-38; Herodotean Inquiries (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969); “Aristotle, De Anima III.3-5,” The Review of Metaphysics 28 (1975) 611-22; “The grammar of Being,” The Review of Metaphysics 30 (1977) 486-96; “On Wisdom and Philosophy: The First Two Chapters of Aristotle’s Metaphysics A,” The Review of Metaphysics 32 (1978) 205-15; “Physics and Tragedy. On Plato's Cratylus,” AncPhil 1 (1980-1) 127-40; The Being of the Beautiful: Plato’s Thaeatetus, Sophist, and Sytatesman (trans.) (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1984); “Cicero's de legibus I: Its Plan and Intention,” AJP 108 (1987) 295-309; Socrates' Second Sailing: on Plato's Republic (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1989); The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy: Plato's Gorgias and Phaedrus (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1991); The Tragedy and Comedy of Life: Plato’s Philebus (trans.) Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1993); “On Plato's Sophist,” The Review of Metaphysics 46 (1992-3) 747-80; The Bow and the Lyre: a Platonic Reading of the Odyssey (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997); “Plato's Theaetetus on the Way of the Logos,” The Review of Metaphysics 51 (1997-8) 25-53; “‘Night and Day’: Parmenides,” Métis 13 (1998) 193-225; Sacred Transgressions: A Reading of Sophicles’ Antigone (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999); “Metamorphosis and Conversion: Apuleius's Metamorphoses,” Literary Imagination, Ancient and Modern: Essays in Honor of David Grene, ed. Todd Breyfogle (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1999) 155-76; “On Heraclitus,” The Review of Metaphysics 53 (1999-2000) 613-33; The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2000); Plato's Laws: The Discovery of Being (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2000); Leo Strauss on Plato's Symposium (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2001); Plato’s Symposium, trans. with commentary by Benardete & Allan Bloom (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2001); Aristotle On Poetics, trans. with Michael Davis (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2002);Achilles and Hector: the Homeric Hero (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005); Archaeology of the Soul: Platonic Readings of Ancient Poetry and Philosophy (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2012).
  • Notes:

    Seth Benardete was a native New Yorker, who spent the majority of his academic life in his beloved hometown. His bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees were all earned at Chicago; his dissertation on the Homeric hero is one of those slender works of dense learning that hark back to the best traditions of a bygone age. After some years in Massachusetts at both Harvard and Brandeis, Benardete commenced what would be his lifelong tenure at New York University, where he served as a classics professor for more than thirty-five years, from 1965 until his untimely death in the late autumn of 2001. In tandem with his NYU career, Benardete had a distinguished record of lectures and seminars at the New School for Social Research, where he inspired countless students of ancient philosophy and letters. While renowned for his indefatigable work ethic, he was also a devoted family man.

               Alongside noteworthy work on Homer, Herodotus, and Sophocles, Benardete earned international renown for his extensive publications on Plato. The classic “Seth study” is a detailed quasi-commentary on a given work, an analysis of a text that offers a coherent close reading while yielding provocative, highly original insights. His publications wedded rigorous philological study with innovative explications of works that he took seriously as masterful artistic creations. 

               Together with his impressively prolific scholarly bibliography, Benardete was a devoted classroom teacher of great range. His favorite classes included intermediate Greek, Aeschylus, Petronius, and his legendary Lucan seminar (where the syllabus consisted solely of Housman and scholia, and where the two-hour class period regularly was extended to four or more). His extraordinary mastery of many areas of classical studies is reflected in the diverse topics he supervised as a graduate professor, and in the broad range of specialties in classics and philosophy pursued by those of us honored to have known him as a mentor.
  • Sources:

    DAS 8th ed. 3:38; Ronna Burger, “In Memoriam: Seth Benardete (1930-2001) The Review of Metaphysics 56 (2003) 939-41; Matthew S. Santirocco, CW 95 (2002) 445-6; Nicholas Shackel, “The Form of the Benardete Dichotomy,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (2005) 397-417; Michael Caie, “Benardete’s Paradox and the Logic of Counterfactuals,” Analysis 78 (2018) 22-34; Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete, ed. Ronna Burger with Robert Berman & Michael Davis (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2002); The Eccentric Core: The Thought of Seth Benardete, ed. Ronna Burger & Patrick Goodin (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2018); Dialogue in Letters: The Correspondence of Leo Strauss and Seth Benardete, 1952-1973, ed. Ronna Burger & Svetovar Y Minkov (Macon, GA: Mercer U. Press, 2026).