Thanks to a generous endowment from the A.G. Leventis Foundation, the School of History and Classics in the University of Edinburgh has the honour to welcome, every two years, a Visiting Research Professor in Greek, chief among whose duties is the organisation of a major international conference on a theme of his or her own choosing within the wide field of Hellenic studies. There have been four incumbents to date, and four such conferences. From each, a selection of papers has been revised and presented for publication as Edinburgh Leventis Studies, volumes 1–4.

The fourth Leventis Professor was Terry Penner, Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus) and former Affiliate Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Having spent almost all of his teaching career in philosophy departments, Terry very much welcomed his three months as a fully fledged member of a classics department distinguished especially for its contribution to Plato studies. For him, the outstanding collegiality and intellectual power that he encountered among the students, staff and former staff in Edinburgh was ample confirmation of the suggestion that analytical philosophers cannot do without the contributions of, and constant conversation with, their colleagues in classics. For their part, Edinburgh classicists and philosophers, at all levels, found in Terry a welcome reminder of what a university is for: during his tenure of the Leventis Chair Terry assiduously made himself available to students and colleagues, not only as an informal interlocutor and mentor, but also in a series of challenging and fascinating Friday seminars in which the rigour and originality of his thought were a constant source of inspiration.