Owen, Gwilym Ellis Lane (1922–82)

G.E.L. Owen led the reorientation in ancient philosophy that began in the 1950s in Britain and North America. He approached the texts with a profound knowledge of classical scholarship, but also as an analytic philosopher, understanding them as conceptual investigations of live philosophical interest. Concerned primarily with the logic of argumentation, philosophy of science and metaphysics, he wrote influential articles on Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle. Equally important were his classes at Oxford (1953–66), at Harvard (1966–73) and finally at Cambridge, in which he constantly developed and tested his ideas and methods.