David Neil Sedley FBA (born 30 May 1947) is a British philosopher and historian of philosophy. He was the seventh Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University.
Early life
Sedley was educated at Trinity College, Oxford where he was awarded a first class honours degree in Literae Humaniores in 1969. He was awarded a PhD in 1974 by University College London for a text, translation and commentary on Book XXVIII of Epicurus' On Nature.
He is the younger brother of Sir Stephen Sedley.
Academic career
Since 1976 Sedley has been a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge; from 1996 he was Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University before in July 2000 being elevated to the Laurence Professorship of Ancient Philosophy. He retired from this position at the end of September 2014. He was succeeded in this post by his former student, Gábor Betegh.
He has held visiting appointments at Princeton University (September 1981 – March 1982), University of California, Berkeley (1984 and 2004), Yale University (1990), and Cornell University (2001).
Honours
He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in July 1994.
Publications
Book
The Hellenistic Philosophers (with A. A. Long), Cambridge 1987
Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom, Cambridge 1998
The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, Cambridge 2003
Plato's Cratylus, Cambridge 2003
The Midwife of Platonism. Text and Subtext in Plato's Theaetetus, Oxford 2004
Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity, Berkeley and Los Angeles 2007
Pyrrhonists, Patricians, Platonizers. Hellenistic Philosophy in the Period 155–86 BC (edited with A. M. Ioppolo), Naples, 2007