Stanley Rosen

Stanley Howard Rosen (July 29, 1929 – May 4, 2014) was an American philosopher who was Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy and professor emeritus at Boston University. His research and teaching focused on the fundamental questions of philosophy and on the most important figures of its history, from Plato to Heidegger.

Rosen was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His family was of Jewish heritage. He studied under Leo Strauss and, under Strauss's auspices, with Alexandre Kojève in Paris. He did his postdoctoral work at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and became Evan Pugh Professor of philosophy at Penn State University and then Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. He has held the Companys Lectureship at the University of Barcelona, the Cardinal Mercier Lectureship at University of Leuven, the Priestley Lectureship at the University of Toronto, and the Gilson Lectureship at the Institut Catholique in Paris. He served as president of the Metaphysical Society of America in 1991.

Rosen's first two books, a study of Plato's Symposium and Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay, represent his abiding concerns. On the one hand he continuously returned to the roots of the philosophical tradition, in particular to Plato, and, on the other, he thought through modern and postmodern philosophy by confronting their most powerful representatives. The most notable feature of this engagement was the justice done to the two main strands of contemporary philosophy, the continental and analytic movements, represented by their most influential members, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, as preparation for Rosen's criticism and positive proposals.

One of the central themes of Rosen's work is the claim that the extraordinary discourses of philosophy have no other basis than the intelligent understanding of the features of ordinary life or human existence. This theme was given an in-depth treatment in his 2002 work, The Elusiveness of the Ordinary.

Rosen married his wife, Francoise, in 1955; they had three children and four grandchildren.