Paul Shorey

Paul Shorey (August 3, 1857 – April 24, 1934) was an American classical scholar.

Biography Shorey was born at Davenport, Iowa. After graduating from Harvard University in 1878, he studied in Europe at Leipzig University, the University of Bonn, the University of Athens, and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Ph.D., 1884). He was a professor at several institutions from 1885 onward. Professor Shorey served at Bryn Mawr College (1885–1892), then principally at the University of Chicago. From 1901 to 1902, he was professor in the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece, and from 1913 to 1914, he was Roosevelt Lecturer in the University of Berlin. Professor Shorey was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. From 1908, he was managing editor of Classical Philology. Shorey was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1920.

He died in Chicago in 1934. After his death, one of many articles published about him asserted that he knew all 15,693 lines of the Iliad by heart.

The Roosevelt Lectureship The Roosevelt Lecturership involved giving a series of public lectures. In these, Shorey addressed American culture and literature. Besides the public lectures, however, the Roosevelt Lecturer was required to give a seminar in his own special field of study. As a notable Platonic scholar, Shorey naturally offered to conduct a seminar on Plato. He had not reckoned on the views of American scholarship held by the principal German classicist, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who held sway in Berlin. Wilamowitz had no intention of allowing Shorey any scope on Plato:In a letter to Diels of 8 May 1912 ... he wrote that he considered it 'grotesque that the editor of a Chicago journal be brought to Berlin to teach us philology'. ... Wilamowitz could not of course know that Shorey would later refer to his Platon as a 'historical novel' (What Plato Said 1933 p2.), but could have been aware that in a 1911 article in the Nation ... Shorey had named him in a list of German scholars whose 'big ambitious books ... cannot be trusted' (392). Wilamowitz was no more receptive to Shorey's next suggestion, of Pindar, since the two differed on metrical questions. In the end, permission was given for a seminar on the De Anima. As Sprague points out, Wilamowitz had not reckoned on Shorey's view that 'Aristotle is a Platonist au fond'''. In the seminar he explained the relevance, in his view, of Plato's Theaetetus, Phaedo, Republic, Euthydemus, Sophist. Politicus, Meno, and Philebus to a full and exact understanding of De Anima. Sprague comments: 'I am afraid I find it irresistible to remark that Wilamowitz did not really succeed in preventing Shorey from giving a Plato seminar'.

Shorey's student, Harold F. Cherniss, was a well-known historian of ancient philosophy at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and defended Shorey's unitarian interpretation of Plato in several influential books. Shorey's views thus became a central theme of later debates over Plato and Aristotle.