Martha Catherine Beck

Originally from St Cloud, Minnesota, Dr. Martha Beck joined the Lyon faculty in 1996. Her areas of scholarship include Plato, Aristotle, Greek tragedy, archetypal psychology, and the connections between Ancient Greek philosophy and culture and the globalization of knowledge and culture today. For seven years between 1996 and 2006, Dr. Beck was resident faculty mentor for Young House, the upper-class residence halls. She has been on numerous committees. She led Nichols travels trip to Greece in 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 and 2009 and plans to do so again. She has been a member of the Lyon College Flute Choice since 1999. She is a board member of the Arkansas Coalition for Peace and Justice and the Olympia Center for Greek Philosophy and Culture, located in Olympia, Greece. Since 2006 she has published seven books and written six more manuscripts that should be published in 2011 or 2012. Three of the books are on “Tragedy and the Philosophical Life” and show the link between Plato’s dialogues and Greek tragedy. Three of the books apply Aristotle’s concepts of virtue and justice in his ethics and politics to three Greek tragedies: Sophocles’ Philoctetes, Euripides’ Hecuba, and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. One book is an interpretation of Plato’s dialogue on the immortality of the soul, Phaedo, written for students in an introductory philosophy class. One book is an interpretation of Platlo’s Laches, a dialogue between a philosopher, Socrates, and two generals on the question, “What is courage?” One book is an intellectual autobiography that shows the connections between Plato and Aristotle and her own coming-of-age in St. Cloud, Minnesota during the 1960s. Another book discusses the myth of Psyche and Eros and the seven goddesses of Greek mythology. She is currently working on a book about her three-week residency as a Visiting Scholar in Beijing, China, last summer. Over the last two summers, Dr. Beck has traveled to China and Russia with a group of ten scholars from around the world. They deliver papers and listen to colleagues from these nations all talking about the globalization of culture. She is leaving in January 2011 for sabbatical and plans to live in Athens for six months, writing books on the broad notion of the arts and their importance for living a good life in Ancient Greek culture as well as a “Philosopher’s Tour Guide to Greece.”