Michael Frede (31 May 1940 – 11 August 2007) was a prominent scholar of ancient philosophy, described by The Telegraph as "one of the most important and adventurous scholars of ancient philosophy of recent times."

Education and career

Frede earned his Ph.D. at the University of Göttingen in 1966 and worked there as an assistant (Wissenschaftlicher Assistent) from 1966 to 1971. He joined the faculty of the philosophy department at University of California, Berkeley as an assistant professor (1971) and quickly rose to the status of full professor. From 1976 to 1991, he was a professor at the Princeton University Philosophy Department. He returned to Europe in 1991 and took the chair in the history of philosophy at the University of Oxford. In 1997-8 he returned to Berkeley to lecture on free will as the 84th visiting Sather Professor of Classical Literature; the resulting book was published posthumously. He retired from Oxford in 2005 and lived in Athens, Greece, until his death in a drowning accident in 2007. He was a Member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of both the British Academy (elected 1994) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Selected works