Born to a Welsh father and an English mother in Portsmouth, Owen studied Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but was called up to serve as an intelligence officer in World War II.
[1] His papers, in the words of philosopher Malcolm Schofield, provided "a new way of writing about ancient philosophy",[2] while his services to the discipline were recognised with numerous honours, including a Fellowship of the British Academy.
[2] After receiving his secondary education at Portsmouth Grammar School, he went to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he began to study Classics in 1940.
[2] During his second stint at university, Owen became involved in the publication of The Isis Magazine, one of Oxford's student newspapers and kept company with a group of contemporaries with literary interests.
Although his post was designed to provide teaching on Pre-Socratic philosophy, he also directed regular classes on Plato and Aristotle aimed at graduate students.
[7] His other collaborative project were the Symposia Aristotelica, triennial meetings of international Aristotle scholars initiated by Owen and the Swedish classicist Ingemar Düring.
[6] The new post afforded him improved working conditions "with ample funds and support" from the departments of classics, philosophy and the history of science.
[8] When the Laurence Professorship of Ancient Philosophy at University of Cambridge was vacated by the retirement of W. K. C. Guthrie in 1973, Owen made a successful bid to succeed him and returned to England.
[11] In a 2003 book chapter, Martha Nussbaum, who had been one of Owen's doctoral students at Harvard, wrote that he had repeatedly made unwanted sexual advances towards her.
[15] Although his views on this topic have not found universal assent, they introduced, in the words of philosopher Malcolm Schofield, "revolutionary" new perspectives to the study of the Platonic corpus.
[20] Owen's article 'Notes on Ryle's Plato', a guide to the second half of the Parmenides, provided, in the words of philosopher J. L. Ackrill, an "extraordinary condensation of material and analysis".
[1] His central achievement, according to fellow philosopher J. D. G. Evans, was to demonstrate the importance of method and argument in classical philosophy, as opposed to mere dogmatism.
His Bachelor of Philosophy thesis, a "bold and far-reaching study of logic and metaphysics" in Plato,[1] laid the foundation for future work on a group of texts which, under Owen's influence, came to be called 'later dialogues'.
[1] Cooper writes that Owen "fundamentally altered, and deepened, the study of [Plato's late work]" but failed to garner universal support for his preferred, earlier dating of the Timaeus[1] Owen was particularly noted as a mentor for graduate students during his time at Oxford and Harvard, leading Ackrill to call him an "unrivalled teacher of graduates".
He served as the president of the Aristotelian Society in the year of its centenary (1978–79) and was invited to be the 1979 Sather Professor of Classical Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.