Stephen Menn

Stephen Menn is the inaugural Michael and Virginia Walsh Chair in History of Philosophy. His main areas of research are in ancient Greek philosophy (with current projects in Aristotle, in the pre-Socratics, and in neo-Platonism), in medieval Arabic and Latin philosophy, and in the history and philosophy of mathematics. Dr. Menn also forms part of the graduate program in Classics at U of T and  maintains links to Humboldt University in Berlin, where he is an honorary professor of Philosophy, a member of the faculty of the Graduate Program in Ancient Philosophy, and where he held a regular chair between 2011 and 2015.

Before coming to the University of Toronto, Dr. Menn taught at Princeton University from 1989 to 1992 and at McGill University from 1992 to 2025. He first studied mathematics, earning an MA in 1982 and a PhD in 1985, both from the Johns Hopkins University, and then philosophy, earning an MA in 1984 and a PhD in 1989, both from the University of Chicago. Along the way, he also took courses in classics, Arabic, and Sanskrit. He is the author of Plato on God as Nous, of Descartes and Augustine, and of a monograph on Simplicius’ commentary on Aristotle’s Physics and his aims and methods as a commentator (published by Bloomsbury as Simplicius On Aristotle, Physics 1-8, General Introduction to the 12 Volumes of Translations). He is, with Justin E. H. Smith, the editor and translator of Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body, with a book-length introduction. He is also the author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on al-Farabi’s metaphysics, and the editor and translator of the pseudo-Aristotle On Melissus, Xenophanes and Gorgias, forthcoming in a Loeb Classical Library volume ‘Aristotle’: Minor Works edited by Robert Mayhew.

Dr. Menn is currently revising a book manuscript entitled The Aim and the Argument of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (table of contents and current drafts), a mathematical manuscript entitled Feuerbach’s Theorem: A Study in Euclidean and Algebraic Geometry, and a series of articles on ancient philosophy, including pieces on Anaxagoras and Empedocles, on the projects of Aristotle’s Analytics, Physics and De anima, and on neo-Platonic metaphysics.