Platonic Patterns: A Collection of Studies

Holger Thesleff

HOLGER THESLEFF was born 1924 in Helsinki, Finland. He was an artillerist in the wars against the Soviets. After the war he sailed around the world as an apprentice and third mate on a squarerigger, tales of the adventures of which he published in Farewell Windjammer, Thames & Hudson, 1951. His academic studies included Greek, Latin and Comparative Linguistics at the University of Helsinki. He completed his postgraduate studies in London (UCL) in the early 1950s and received his PhD (Helsinki) in 1954, with a thesis on intensifying expressions in ancient Greek. In addition to his many publications in Finnish and Swedish, he also authored works in English on the Greek and Latin languages. In the late 1950s, he began to study the Pythagorean literature from a Platonistic perspective (two important contributions in English, 1961 and 1965), after which he devoted his studies to Plato. Since 1955, Thesleff had various academic appointments in Finland, and in 1968, he was honored with the chair of Greek Philology at the University of Helsinki, from which he retired in 1987. Among his many accomplishments, he edited the complete translations of Plato in Swedish and Finnish. He is a member of various professional societies, and is a founding member of the Nordic Plato Society (Platonselskabet) since 1970, and of the International Plato Society (IPS) since 1989. He was frequently invited to international conferences in Europe, Australia, and in the United States. This present collection includes most of his contributions to Plato studies written in English. However, he has also published numerous academic works in Swedish and Finnish on the history of ancient ideas, and especially on Plato. Among his publications is a comprehensive monograph on Plato (Platon, in Finnish, 1989, and in Swedish, 1990); and, in cooperation with Juha Sihvola, a volume on Ancient Philosophy and the History of Ideas (Antiikin historia ja aatemaailma in Finnish, 1994).