34 Facts About Eric Havelock

Eric Alfred Havelock was a British classicist who spent most of his life in Canada and the United States.

Eric Havelock was a professor at the University of Toronto and was active in the Canadian socialist movement during the 1930s.

Much of Eric Havelock's work was devoted to addressing a single thesis: that all of Western thought is informed by a profound shift in the kinds of ideas available to the human mind at the point that Greek philosophy converted from an oral to a literate form.

Eric Havelock's influence has spread beyond the study of the classical world to that of analogous transitions in other times and places.

Cornford at Cambridge, Eric Havelock began to question the received wisdom about the nature of pre-Socratic philosophy and, in particular, about its relationship with Socratic thought.

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Eric Havelock eventually came to the conclusion that the poetic aspects of early philosophy "were matters not of style but of substance", and that such thinkers as Heraclitus and Empedocles actually have more in common even on an intellectual level with Homer than they do with Plato and Aristotle.

In 1926 Eric Havelock took his first academic job at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Eric Havelock married Ellen Parkinson in 1927, and moved on to Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 1929.

Eric Havelock did not, continuing to act as an ally and occasional spokesman for Underhill and other leftist professors.

Eric Havelock found himself in trouble again in 1937 after criticising both the government's and industry's handling of an automotive workers' strike.

Eric Havelock's work was complemented by that of Harold Innis, who was working on the history of media.

Eric Havelock continued to write about politics, however, and his political and academic work came together in his ideas about education; he argued for the necessity of an understanding of rhetoric for the resistance to corporate persuasiveness.

Eric Havelock's position, drawn from analyses of Xenophon and Aristophanes as well as Plato himself, was that Plato's presentation of his teacher was largely a fiction, and intended to be a transparent one, whose purpose was to represent indirectly Plato's own ideas.

Eric Havelock argued vociferously against the idea associated with John Burnet, which still had currency at the time, that the basic model for the theory of forms originated with Socrates.

Eric Havelock's argument drew on evidence for a historical change in Greek philosophy; Plato, he argued, was fundamentally writing about the ideas of his present, not of the past.

In 1947, Eric Havelock moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to take a position at Harvard University, where he remained until 1963.

Eric Havelock was active in a number of aspects of the University and of the department, of which he became chair; he undertook a translation of and commentary on Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound for the benefit of his students.

Eric Havelock published this translation, with an extended commentary on Prometheus and the myth's implications for history, under the title The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man.

Eric Havelock's focus was on political philosophy and, in particular, the beginnings of Greek liberalism as introduced by Democritus.

Rather than attempting to explain his distinction between 5th- and 4th-century BC thought in terms of a dissection of the earlier school, Eric Havelock turned, in his 1963 Preface to Plato, to 4th century BC philosophy itself.

Eric Havelock was interested principally in Plato's much debated rejection of poetry in the Republic, in which his fictionalised Socrates argues that poetic mimesis—the representation of life in art—is bad for the soul.

Eric Havelock's claim was that the Republic can be used to understand the position of poetry in the "history of the Greek mind.

Instead of concentrating on the philosophical definitions of key terms, as he had in his book on Democritus, Eric Havelock turned to the Greek language itself, arguing that the meaning of words changed after the full development of written literature to admit a self-reflective subject; even pronouns, he said, had different functions.

Two distinct phenomena are covered by the shift Eric Havelock observed in Greek culture at the end of the 5th century: the content of thought, and the organisation of thought.

In Homer, Eric Havelock argues, the order of ideas is associative and temporal.

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Thus, the Platonic theory of forms in itself, Eric Havelock claims, derives from a shift in the organisation of the Greek language, and ultimately comes down to a different function for and conception of the noun.

Philosophy, particularly Platonic scholarship, was moving in a different direction at the time, and Eric Havelock neither engages nor was cited by the principal movers in that field.

Some later classicists argue that the poetic nature of Homer's language works against the very arguments Eric Havelock makes about the intellectual nature of oral poetry.

Eric Havelock is the most cited writer in Walter J Ong's influential Orality and Literacy other than Ong himself.

Eric Havelock's work has been cited in studies of orality and literacy in African culture and the implications of modern literacy theory for library science.

Shortly after publication of Preface to Plato, Eric Havelock accepted a position as chair of the Classics Department at Yale University.

Eric Havelock remained in New Haven for eight years, and then taught briefly as Raymond Distinguished Professor of Classics at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Eric Havelock retired in 1973 and moved to Poughkeepsie, New York, where his wife Christine Mitchell, whom he had married in 1962, taught at Vassar College.

Eric Havelock was a productive scholar after his retirement, writing three books as well as numerous essays and talks expanding the arguments of Preface to Plato to a generalised argument about the effect of literacy on Greek thought, literature, culture, society, and law.