Gisela Striker (born 1943) is a German classical scholar. She is Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Classics at Harvard University and a specialist in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy.
Education and career
Striker was born and educated in
Germany, earning her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Göttingen under the supervision of
Günther Patzig in 1969 and her
Habilitation, also from Göttingen in 1978.
She taught philosophy at Göttingen from 1971–1986, and then was professor of philosophy at Columbia University from 1986–1989, and then at Harvard from 1989–1997. In 1997, she became the sixth Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge,
England, serving until 2000, when she returned to Harvard.
She expressed frustration with the ancient philosophy program at Harvard.
Philosophical work
Striker specializes in ancient philosophy, teaching
Plato and
Aristotle, as well as earlier and later
Ancient Greece and
Ancient Rome authors. She has written mostly on topics in Hellenistic philosophy (the
epistemology and ethics of
Stoics,
Epicureans, and
Skeptics) and on Aristotelian logic. Her work on Aristotle's logic builds on the tradition started in 1951 by
Jan Lukasiewicz[Degnan, M. 1994. Recent Work in Aristotle's Logic. Philosophical Books 35.2 (April, 1994): 81-89.] and reinvigorated in the early 1970s by John Corcoran and
Timothy Smiley.
[*Review of "Aristotle, Prior Analytics: Book I, Gisela Striker (translation and commentary), Oxford UP, 2009, 268pp., $39.95 (pbk), ." in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2010.02.02 .]
