Victorino Tejera

Professor Tejera was a founding member of the International Plato Society in Perugia, Italy in 1989, a member of the International Organizing Committee for the International Conference on Greek Philosophy, and was made an Honorary Citizen of Lindos, Rhodes for his work on Greek Culture in 1992. He served as Program Chair for the Committee for Aesthetics in 1968 and on the executive committee of the Long Island Philosophy Society in 1976. In 1986, he was Program Director for the Society for Advancement of American Philosophy conference honoring John H. Randall Jr., and Herbert W. Schneider.

Tejera's most widely recognized book Plato's Dialogues: A Dialogical Interpretation (c. 1984, updated and revised 1999) advanced the dramatic and dialogical reading of Plato which influenced and precipitated a generation of Plato studies (cf. Gerald A. Press editions in Further reading below). Tejera invented and invoked a unique notation to address the confusion in Plato scholarship to address the Socratic problem in these and other papers, to disambiguate Plato's Socrates from the Historical Socrates, Xenophon's Socrates, and the various interpretations claimed to be Plato's own views. "To keep track of the many composite Socrates, both of "the tradition" and of individual commentators, we use the label SocC, "Socrates sub upper-case C." (cf. The Philosophy of Socrates Program Guide p. 106).

Above all, Tejera felt strongly influenced by Justus Buchler's metaphysics of literary art (metaphysics of human production) and the exhibitive nature of philosophy reflected in Buchler's Metaphysics of Natural Complexes and The Main of Light. The influence of Buchler is one of the most apparent in Tejera's published works. Buchler was his dissertation adviser at Columbia when he wrote Philosophy and the Art of Poetry (1956), and longtime colleague and correspondent.

Tejera lectured in history at Georgetown University from 1951 to 1954, and then taught philosophy at Rensselaer Polytechnic from 1956 to 1960, Farleigh Dickinson University 1960 to 1961, and Howard University from 1961 to 1966. Afterward he accepted a permanent position of Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York (SUNY) campus at Stony Brook. He was conferred the title of Stony Brook University Professor of Humanities in 1991, and has since received the title of University Professor Emeritus (1996).

His early philosophic passion was Greek Philosophy, and he received instruction in Classical Greek from Fred Householder. He studied History of Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Literary Theory. He also attended summer sessions in the late 1940s at the Kenyon School of English. He was profoundly affected by the writings of John Dewey and George Santayana, as well as by the work and literature of the New Critics John Crowe Ransom, His art and literary interests in New York City enabled encounters with noted artists, writers, and poets of the beat generation such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Fritz Stern, and artist Jacob Kainen, with whom he formed an enduring friendship. He was identified as the character 'Victor Villanueva' in Kerouac's On the Road, a Latin American poet. Tejera published and translated poems as well.

Tejera attended St. Mary's College in Southampton, England, a boarding school, from 1930 to 1938, receiving his Matriculate (university entry status certificate) in London in 1939. He received a fellowship to study at Columbia University in the U.S., completing his Bachelor of Arts degree at the undergraduate college in philosophy (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1948 and his doctorate at the graduate school in philosophy in 1956 with a dissertation on "Philosophy and the Art of Poetry". He also completed his docente (teacher's training) at the Central University of Venezuela in 1951.

Victorino Tejera (born Tejera Márquez; November 2, 1922 – August 25, 2018) was a writer, scholar, and professor of philosophy with specializations in ancient Greek thought, Metaphysics, Aesthetics, and American philosophy (Naturalism, Semiotics). He was born in Caracas, Venezuela. He is known especially for his writing on Plato's Dialogues. Many scholars believe Tejera's work in this area is his most valuable contribution to philosophy (see Notes and Further reading). He was editor and contributor with Thelma Lavine on History and Anti-History in Philosophy (1989, 2012) whose From Socrates to Sartre (1984) was the basis for the PBS series of the same name.