All Scholars

Frederic Schroeder, son of a prominent Ontarian barrister and later provincial Supreme Court judge, is a prime example of a scholar who stuck to his last.  Fifty years separate a dissertation on Plotinian metaphysics from an article on Plotinian aesthetics, published two years before his death.  Plotinus was always at the centre of his interests, from graduate studies under John Rist at Toronto, as Rist was preparing Plotinus: The Road to Reality (1969), through his own book of 1992 and a series of articles, a few of which are listed above.  His papers were invariably of medium length, careful probing studies that balanced philological rigour with constructive interpretation.  But he also fanned out from Plotinus into adjacent areas, notably in his work on Alexander of Aphrodisias.  He could address larger themes, as in his masterly survey of Plotinus and language, and his synoptic study of the self in ancient religious experience.  He could also go on surprising detours, as in his treatment of friendship in Aristotle and the Peripatetics.  His methodology was developed in light of related scholarship in France and especially in Germany, where he spent a formative year as a graduate student.   He was a genuinely international scholar, while also gratified that his work could find a home in Canada, in Dionysius, a journal for the study of late antiquity produced by the classicists at Dalhousie University.   His body of work will unquestionably have lasting value for neo-platonic studies.