Sarah Broadie, 1941-2021

One of the world’s leading authorities on the work of Aristotle and Plato has died.

Sarah Broadie was born in Wincanton, Somerset on 3 November 1941 and grew up in Gambia and Jamaica as well as in the UK – her father, John Waterlow, having been an expert on malnutrition in children and set up the Tropical Metabolism Research Unit at the University of the West Indies. She studied Greats – Classics and philosophy – at Somerville College, Oxford and always combined interpretation of ancient texts with making her own contribution to philosophical thought.

After starting her career as a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh (1967-84), Professor Broadie spent an extended period in the US. She was professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin (1984-86), Yale University (1987-91), Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (1991-93) and Princeton University (1993-2001).

She then returned to Scotland and the University of St Andrews for the rest of her life, where she served as professor of philosophy and, from 2003, also Wardlaw professor. On arrival at the university, she was welcomed by the chancellor, Sir Kenneth Dover – himself a major classical scholar who much admired her work – and invited to join both the private Laurentian Club and the group of senior professors from the arts and humanities known as Geisters.

A prolific author, Professor Broadie published both Nature, Change and Agency in Aristotle’s Physics (1982) and Passage and Possibility: A Study of Aristotle’s Modal Concepts (1982) under the name of Sarah Waterlow. She followed these up, as Sarah Broadie, with titles including Ethics with Aristotle (1991), Aristotle and Beyond: Essays on Metaphysics and Ethics (2007) and Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus (2012). Her final book, Plato’s Sun-Like Good: Dialectic in the Republic (2021), appeared in July.

In a tribute published by the St Andrews department of philosophy, John Haldane, emeritus professor of moral philosophy, and Moira Gilruth, journal manager of The Philosophical Quarterly, describe Professor Broadie as “among the top scholars in Greek philosophy in the world”. They also note her “capacity for deep friendship”, “strong sense of justice and a natural charity”, adding that she “respected cultural traditions but had a distaste for shallowness and group thought”.

A fellow of the British Academy from 2003 and later vice-president (2006-08), Professor Broadie was also appointed OBE for her services to scholarship (2019). She died on 9 August and is survived by her two stepsons, Alexander Broadie (himself a philosopher) and Jonathan Broadie, as well as the latter’s children.

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com