The 2008 Aquinas Lecture, Aristotle’s Divine Intellect, was delivered on Sunday, February 24, 2008, by Myles F. Burnyeat, Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University, and Honorary Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge University.
Myles Burnyeat studied Classics and Philosophy at King’s College, Cambridge and pursued graduate studies at University College, London, where he also taught from 1964-1978. In 1978 he moved to Robinson College, Cambridge University, and was appointed Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy there in 1984. In 1996 he was appointed Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at All Souls College, Oxford University. He has held visiting appointments at numerous universities, including the University of Pittsburgh, Princeton University, Harvard University, University of California at Berkeley, and the Central European University in Budapest. He has given many invited lectures, including the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Harvard University, the A.E. Taylor Lecture at University of Edinburgh, and the British Academy Master Mind Lecture.
Among other honors and awards, Prof. Burnyeat was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1984, was President of the Mind Association in 1987, became a member of the Institut International de Philosophie in 1988, was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, and was President of the Aristotelian Society in 2005-06. Most recently Prof. Burnyeat was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his services to scholarship.
Prof. Burnyeat has been a prolific scholar, having published two books, The Theaetetus of Plato (with its 240 page introduction) and A Map of Metaphysics Zeta. He has edited or co-edited eight books, including Doubt and Dogmatism, Science and Speculation, and The Skeptical Tradition. His breadth of research interests can be grasped from the titles of a few of his publications, many of which have been translated into other languages: “Aristotle on Understanding Knowledge.” “Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed,” “Did the Ancient Greeks Have the Concept of Human Rights?,” “Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic,” “Aquinas on ‘Spiritual Change’ in Perception,” “Platonism in the Bible: Numenius of Apamea on Exodus and Eternity,” “Examples in Epistemology: Socrates, Theaetetus and G.E. Moore,” “The Past in the Present: Plato as Educator of Nineteenth-Century Britain.”