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Sarah Broadie, scholar of ancient Greek philosophy

Sarah Broadie was recognized as one of the world’s leading scholars on Aristotle and Plato. This article is about her contribution to our understanding of Greek philosophy and will say nothing about her career or honours. Her work opened up new areas of inquiry in modality, ethics, psychology, theology and cosmology in ancient Greek philosophy, and even those who, after study of her arguments, disagreed with her conclusions readily acknowledge her inspiration and influence. She had an extraordinary ability to see alternatives – not only non-traditional interpretations, but also new criteria for testing interpretations – and it was characteristic of her to explore every layer of an alternative before sharing it in print. Through her example she showed others the rigour, serious striving for the truth, and depth of philosophical engagement that are possible in the study of philosophy’s ancient past. Accordingly, this article is structured in such a way as to bring out not the conclusions she reached so much as her exemplary qualities as a scholar in the history of philosophy, or, to use Aristotelian language, the intellectual virtues of her scholarship. I take my examples primarily from her books and discuss only a few of her articles. What follows gives no more than a taste of her work, and I hope it will encourage others to visit or revisit her writing and savour it directly. By way of illustrating her influence on the field I start with not a book or article but a talk. Her presentation on the Timaeus at a Cambridge seminar in 1993 was cited for a period of over ten years by several other scholars, all leaders in the field, who comment on its powerful influence on their work. One part of her talk’s influence was to make scholars rethink the