Michael Frede (German: [ˈfʁeːdə]; 31 May 1940 – 11 August 2007) 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."^[1]

Education and career

Frede earned his Ph.D. at the University of Göttingen in 1966 and worked there as an assistant (Wissenschaftlicher Assistent) from 1966 to 1971.^[1]

He joined the faculty of the philosophy department at University of California, Berkeley^[2] as an assistant professor (1971) and quickly rose to the status of full professor. From 1976 to 1991, he was a professor at the Princeton University Philosophy Department.^[3]

He returned to Europe in 1991 and took the chair in the history of philosophy at the University of Oxford.^[4] 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.^[5] He retired from Oxford in 2005 and lived in Athens, Greece, until his death in a drowning accident in 2007.^[1]

He was a Member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of both the British Academy (elected 1994)^[6] and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Selected works

• Pradikation und Existenzaussage: Platons Gebrauch von "...ist..." und "...ist nicht..." im Sophistes, 1967^[1]
• Die Stoische Logik, 1974^[1]
• Galen. Three Treatises on the Nature of Science (co-edited with Richard Walzer), 1985
• Essays in Ancient Philosophy, 1987^[1]
• Aristoteles 'Metaphysik Z': Text, Übersetzung und Kommentar, 2 vols (with Günther Patzig), 1988^[1]
• The Original Sceptics: A Controversy (co-edited with Myles Burnyeat), 1997
• Rationality in Greek Thought (co-edited with Gisela Striker), 1999^[1]
• Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (co-edited with Polymnia Athanassiadi), 2001^[1]
• Aristotle's Metaphysics Book Lambda (co-edited with David Charles), 2001^[7]
• A Free Will: origins of the notion in ancient thought (edited by A. A. Long with a foreword by David Sedley), 2011
• The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter (Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics), (co-author with Myles Burnyeat) Oxford University Press 2015^[8]