Richard Lewis Nettleship

Richard Lewis Nettleship (17 December 1846 – 25 August 1892), English philosopher, youngest brother of Henry Nettleship, was educated at Uppingham and Balliol College, Oxford, where he held a scholarship.

He won the Hertford scholarship, the Ireland, the Gaisford Prize for Greek verse, a Craven scholarship and the Arnold prize, but took only a second class in Literae Humaniores. He became fellow and tutor of his college and succeeded to the work of TH Green (1836–82), whose writings he edited with a memoir (three volumes, London : Longmans, Green & Co.,1885-8) He left an unfinished work on Plato, part of which was published after his death, together with his lectures on logic and some essays. His notable - long, brilliant and profound - essay, 'The Theory of Education in the Republic of Plato', was published in Hellenica, ed. Evelyn Abbott, (London : Longmans, Green & Co., 1st ed., 1880) : 70-165.

His thought was idealistic, embodying elements of Hegelianism but also, in its account of the Platonic Forms (eide, idiai), markedly influenced by a particular reading of the Kantian categories (D.A. Rees, The Republic of Plato, ed. James Adam, Cambridge : CUP, 1965/ 1902), I : xxv). His literary style was excellent; and he influenced his students' thinking considerably. Many saw him as a model and example of philosophical honest and persistent philosophical inquiry. This did not prevent the undergraduates of Balliol from a gentle parody in the 1880 Masque of Balliol :

Roughly, so to say, you know,
I am N-TTL-SH-P or so;
You are gated after Hall,
That's all. I mean that's nearly all.

The inchoateness of Nettleship's philosophical thinking is more apparent in the Philosophical Remains (The Philosophical Remains of Richard Lewis Nettleship, ed. A.C. Bradley, London : Macmillan, 1897, 2nd ed., 1901) than in the separate volume of lectures on Plato's Republic (Lectures on the Republic of Plato, ed. Lord Charnwood,London : Macmillan, 1897, 2nd ed., 1901). From that volume a definite view of the aims, limits and scope of Plato's text emerges clearly. Few historians of philosophy would now accept, however, Nettleship's view of the analogy of the Line (509e-511c, 534a) as involving throughout a temporal progression (see R.C. Cross and A.D. Woozley, Plato's Republic : A Philosophical Commentary, London : Macmillan, 1964).

He was fond of music and outdoor sports, and rowed in his college boat. He died on 25 August 1892, from the effects of exposure on Mont Blanc, and was buried at Chamonix.