Raphael Demos

Raphael S. Demos (; ; January 23, 1892 – August 8, 1968) was a Greek-American philosopher. He was Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity at Harvard University and an authority on the work of Plato. At Harvard, he taught Martin Luther King Jr.

Early life Raphael Demetracopoulos was born to Ottoman Greek parents at Smyrna (now Izmir), in the Ottoman Empire, on January 23, 1892. His father, Stratos Demetracopoulos, had been converted to evangelical Christianity by missionaries and had become an evangelical minister. Demos was brought up in Istanbul, and earned his A.B. degree in 1910 from Anatolia College in Marsovan. Demos obtained his PhD from Harvard in 1916 for a dissertation titled The Definition of Judgment. He was naturalized as an American citizen in 1921.

Family Demos married Jean and they had a son, John Demos, who attended Harvard University and became a noted historian at Yale University, and a daughter, Penny, who attended Radcliffe College. Jean was on the staff of the New England Conservatory of Music from where she later received an honorary doctor of music degree. Demos's sister, Dorothy Demetracopoulou, graduated from Vassar College in 1927.

Career Demos began his academic career at Harvard as an assistant in philosophy in 1916–17, rising to assistant professor in 1926. He studied at the University of Cambridge in 1918–19. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1927, awarded for "a study of the philosophy of evolution and social philosophy, principally in Paris, France", for which he studied at the University of Paris in 1928–29. In 1956, he received an award from the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as from the American Philosophy Association in 1959 and the Littauer Foundation in 1960.

Demos retired from Harvard in 1962, after which he taught at Vanderbilt University in 1962–63 and 1964–67. He taught at McGill University in Montreal in 1963–64. Coincidentally, King's wife, Coretta, had studied with Demos's wife Jean at the New England Conservatory of Music.

Death and legacy Demos died of a heart attack on 8 August 1968 while on board the S.S. Anna Maria returning to the United States. His papers relating to Aristotle are held in the archives of Harvard University. A volume of essays in Demos's honour was issued in 2016.

Selected publications The Dialogues of Plato. Random House, New York, 1920. (Introduction) (Translated by Benjamin Jowett) Plato selections. C. Scribner's Sons, New York, 1927. (Editor) (The Modern Student's Library) Complete works of Plato. 1936. (Editor) The philosophy of Plato. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1939. "Business and the good society", Harvard Business Review, July–August 1955. "The neo-Hellenic enlightenment (1750–1821): A general survey", Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XIX, No. 4 (October 1958), pp. 523–541.