Twenty-five years after he began his research and teaching career at U of T, Brad Inwood has been named a University Professor, the highest honour the university bestows on its faculty for their scholarship.

Inwood started at U of T in July 1982 and today the professor of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy teaches in both the classics and the philosophy departments. He is a Canada Research Chair in ancient philosophy.

“When people comment that I’m a professor in the research stream, I point out to them that my job description has an equal balance between teaching and research. Teaching is as important to me as my research,” Inwood said. “A researcher must be able to appreciate and critically assess the quality of evidence relevant to the field. These qualities and skills are in turn brought into the classroom.

“Those are things that are the nuts and bolts of my research and they’re the principal goals of my teaching,” Inwood said. “Ideally students learn to think critically, they learn to distinguish evidence from inference and they learn the importance of historical details.”

Prominent among Inwood’s scholarly and research activities has been his work on Stoicism in the Hellenistic period and his study of Empedocles, a Greek pre-Socratic scholar. His most recent book, published in 2005, is
entitled Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome.