Alexander Nehamas is the former Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities, Philosophy, and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Before retiring in 2021, he chaired Princeton’s Council of the Humanities, the Program in Hellenic Studies, and was founding director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. Nehamas holds the chair in history of philosophy at the Academy of Athens. His books include Nietzsche: Life as Literature; The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault; Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates; Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art; and On Friendship. He has also translated Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus into English.
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Is a thing of beauty, as Keats wrote, “a joy forever?” Or is it, as in the view of Camus, “unbearable”? The precise nature of beauty and how to understand its role in our live...