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F. M. Cornford

English classical scholar (1874–1943)

Summary

English classical scholar (1874–1943)

Field	Value
name	F. M. Cornford
honorific_suffix
image	Cornford-francis-macdonald.jpg
birth_name	Francis Macdonald Cornford
birth_date
birth_place	Eastbourne, England
death_date
death_place	Cambridge, England
spouse
children
alma_mater	Trinity College, Cambridge
influences	{{flatlist
*Gilbert Murray{{sfn	Johnson	2008	p	2}}
*A. W. Verrall{{sfn	Johnson	2008	p	2}}
discipline	Classics
sub_discipline
workplaces	Trinity College, Cambridge
doctoral_students
notable_students	W. K. C. Guthrie
influenced

F. M. Cornford should not be confused with his wife Frances Cornford.

Gilbert Murray
A. W. Verrall Francis Macdonald Cornford (27 February 1874 – 3 January 1943) was an English classical scholar and translator known for work on ancient philosophy, notably Plato, Parmenides, Thucydides, and ancient Greek religion. Frances Cornford, his wife, was a noted poet. Due to the similarity in their names, he was known in the family as "FMC" and his wife as "FCC".

Early life and family

Cornford was born in Eastbourne, Sussex, on 27 February 1874. He attended St Paul's School, London.

In 1909 Cornford married the poet Frances Darwin, daughter of Sir Francis Darwin and Ellen Wordsworth Darwin, née Crofts, and a granddaughter of Charles Darwin. They had five children:

Helena (1913–1994), who married Joseph L. Henderson in 1934
John (1915–1936), poet and Communist killed in the Spanish Civil War
Christopher (1917–1993), artist and writer, the father of Adam Cornford
Hugh Wordsworth (1921–1997), medical doctor
Ruth Clare (1923–1992), mother of Matthew Chapman

Career

Cornford was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a Fellow from 1899 and held a teaching post from 1902. He became the first Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy in 1931 and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1937. He used wit and satire to propagate proposals for reforming the teaching of the classics at Cambridge, in Microcosmographia Academica (1908).

Cornford coined the phrase "twin pillars of Platonism", referring to the theory of Forms on the one hand, and, on the other the doctrine of immortality of the soul.

Death

He died on 3 January 1943 in his home, Conduit Head in Cambridge. He was cremated at Cambridge Crematorium on 6 January 1943.

Works

Thucydides Mythistoricus (1907) put the argument that Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War was informed by Thucydides's tragic view.
From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation (1912) sought the deep religious and social concepts that informed the early Greek philosophers. He returned to this in Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought (posthumous, 1952).
Microcosmographia Academica (1908) was an insider's satire on academic politics. It was the source of catch phrases such as the "doctrine of unripeness of time", the "principle of the wedge" and the "principle of the dangerous precedent".
Before and After Socrates (1932)
Plato's Cosmology : The Timaeus of Plato. Hackett Publishing Company (1935)
According to the preface to The Republic of Plato, translated with an introduction and notes (OUP, 1941), it "aims at conveying... as much as possible of the thought of the Republic in the most convenient and least misleading form."

References

Footnotes

Sources

References

Pearce, Jeremy. (4 December 2007). "Joseph L. Henderson, 104; Expanded Jungian Methods". The New York Times.
{{acad
Francis Cornford, 1941. ''The Republic of Plato''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. xxv.
Wilby, Peter. (4 May 2009). "Pass the Sickbag, Alice".
(10 September 2001). "Slavery Was Theft: We Should Pay".

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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