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“... relevant as any table of economic indicators. Again according to myth, the Gorgona, the sister of Alexander the Great, was transformed into a mermaid. Even today, she stops ships sailing in Greek waters and helps those sailors who assure her that her brother is still alive to arrive at their destination, while destroying those who tell her the sad truth. A ...”

“... The first thing Alzheimer’s disease took away from Iris Murdoch was her luminous powers. At a conference in Israel in 1994, she was unable to answer her audience’s questions. In 1995, she completed, with great difficulty, her 27th novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, in which readers found several errors and inconsistencies; it was to be her last. Her philosophical work had already stopped ...”

“... The state of elementary, intermediate and higher education in America has been a serious cause for concern in recent years. Diverse groups and individuals have issued scathing reports on the low quality of current educational schemes, dire warnings about their potential consequences, and mostly vague recommendations regarding their reform. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, described on the New York Times best-seller list as ‘a critique of liberal arts education during the past twenty-five years’, has been widely considered as a distinguished part of this broad critical movement ...”

“... The ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry which Plato described, and in which he took part, is still being fought. Poetry today has become, more generally, ‘rhetoric’, ‘fiction’, ‘literature’, ‘literariness’, ‘narrative’ or ‘writing’. It has even found an ally within the enemy’s ranks – the recent anti-philosophical philosophy sometimes known as the New Pragmatism ...”

“... Thales of Miletus, with whom histories of Western philosophy conventionally begin, was said to have been so concerned with the heavens that he fell into a well while he was gazing at the stars. Ever since then (ever since they have existed, that is) philosophers have been objects of amusement and subjects of satire. For one thing, philosophical views often seem intolerably abstruse ...”

“... Our century has been distrustful of beauty. Our philosophy follows Kant, who found beauty only in a contemplation of nature and art which yields an ‘entirely disinterested satisfaction’, pleasure bereft of desire. In literature and the arts, Modernism prized what is difficult, discomforting and edifying. As the gap between high and low culture became ever wider, the beauty which mattered to intellectuals, when it mattered to them at all, came to seem different in kind from the beauty which mattered to the world at large, and, for that reason, irrelevant and empty: the higher the pleasure it provoked, the less like pleasure it seemed ...”

“... elements of his early view about the relation of art and life, he continues to think, according to Alexander Nehamas, that life can be fashioned into literature. The historical author is less important than the literary artwork, and the world is itself like a literary text. Texts demand interpretation, and we find out about anything, including ourselves ...”

“... is that his topics are systematically interconnected. ‘His views are exhilarating,’ writes Alexander Nehamas, ‘because they are systematic, and the discovery that a philosopher is systematic, like the discovery that an artist has a style, is a cause for rejoicing: it does credit both to the subject studied and to its student.’ The ‘subject ...”