Ivy League professor wrote on philosophy
Sarah Broadie, who has died age 79, was a pre-eminent scholar of Greek philosophy, a fellow of three national academies, holder of professorships at Yale, Princeton and St. Andrews, and a member of a distinguished family that included a saviour of malnourished children.
Sarah Waterlow, as she was when she began her academic career, brought formidable knowledge of Latin and Greek language and literature to the study of the natural philosophy and metaphysics of Aristotle.
It is commonly said that every philosopher is either an Aristotelian or a Platonist. Sarah Broadie would have said that no one who knows their work could think things were so simple. It was with Aristotle that she began, writing Nature, Change and Agency, and Passage and Possibility.
His central notion, she argued, was that natural things have an inner essence and that this explains pretty much everything else significant about them.
In Ethics with Aristotle (1991) she shifted from metaphysics to morality and brilliantly expounded and assessed his ideas about character and conduct. This was followed by a co-authored work, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (2007), in which she provided the exegesis and commentary.
Both books received admiring reviews from her peers, but the greatest appreciation was that of students across the world who learned more from her on the subject than from any other recent scholar.
Her last two books were on Plato: Nature and Divinity in the Timaeus (2012) and Plato's Sun-like God (2021).
Raised in a form of notional Anglicanism, she later converted to Judaism under the influence of her much older husband, the philosopher Frederick Broadie, whom she met at Edinburgh University.
Sarah Waterlow was born on Nov. 3, 1941, in the family home of her mother Angela Gray at Galhampton, Castle Cary, Somerset.
Her father John Cornford Waterlow was a distinguished physiologist whose researches into the causes and character of malnutrition in children in Gambia and the West Indies led to the establishment of the Tropical Metabolism Research Unit in Jamaica.
It has been said that his discoveries saved hundred of thousands of lives.
After almost two decades at Edinburgh, Sarah Broadie moved to the U.S., holding in turn professorships at Texas, Yale, Rutgers and Princeton. She returned to Scotland in 2001 to a chair in Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews.