From The Telegraph. (Thanks to Ophelia Benson for the pointer.) I've added the link to my original notice as well.
UPDATE: Several readers have pointed out that the London Times also ran a substantial obituary several weeks ago. I've opened comments for readers to post any others.
None of the obituaries address what a Princeton grad student at the time called "one of the great mysteries of contemporary scholarship on ancient philosophy": namely, Professor Frede's unusual speech "tick" when speaking English. I can still recall attending the first meeting of Frede's lecture course on Aristotle at Princeton almost 25 years ago. (That was an excellent course, by the way.) Since this was difficult material, I felt it important to take meticulous notes. Again and again, though, there was some word Professor Frede said that I could not make out. I tried writing down his sentences word for word, but the unintelligible sound--it sounded like "svine" with a long "i"--came in places where it didn't make sense: "Aristotle's svine metaphysics," and so on. A grad student subsequently explained to me that Frede inserted this sound into his sentences while speaking English, a kind of speech tick like those who use the word "uh," though "svine" appeared at strange places. I was told he didn't have this tick when speaking German, and that it didn't happen when he read an English paper. I did not hear Professor Frede speak in the last two decades, so, I wonder, did he continue to do this?
