“... by wishes. Pears goes on to consider a number of philosophical accounts of irrational behaviour. Aristotle’s term akrasia, though often mistranslated as ‘weakness of will’, is better represented by ‘lack of control’, the implication being that the agent’s reason is not in control of his actions. ...”

“... made a heroic effort to save and protect philosophy.’ The great classical philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Farabi, Maimonides) engaged in this effort, Bloom claims, by composing esoteric works which often seem to unite philosophy and public life. But the philosophers know that society will never consent to be governed according to their objective ...”

“... the need for attention to what she calls the ‘central human capabilities’. This student of Aristotle and of Marx, and sometime collaborator with Amartya Sen, insists that a truly human life is characterised at the very minimum by the possibility of functioning in certain ways. We can judge whether this bare minimum is met by asking not about how ...”

“... the elements first expounded by Empedocles in the fifth century bc and later taken up by Plato and Aristotle. Empedocles proposed that all matter is constituted by the four elements of earth, air, fire and water, and that these elements are not immutable: solid substances could be melted to flow like water, while water could be frozen solid. According to ...”

“... 1945 – by 4 p.m. the Führer will be dead.’ ‘Tragedy endeavours​ , as far as possible,’ Aristotle wrote in the Poetics, ‘to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun.’ Fielding in Tom Jones argued that writers weren’t ‘obliged to keep even pace with time’, but would do well to steer clear of ‘monkish dullness’ and focus on ...”

“... disappeared to in winter. The question had puzzled ornithologists since the time of the ancients: Aristotle had been pretty sure that storks hibernated in trees. He also deduced that redstarts transformed into robins in the winter months and turned back again in the spring. In this he was no more wrong than Olaus Magnus, archbishop of Uppsala, who in 1555 ...”

“... analysis of language,’ and calls this a come-down from ‘the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant’. I cannot identify the quotation, but it is a fair enough inference from Wittgenstein’s later practice. What Hawking has overlooked is that it is in the analysis of the language of physics that his own book principally consists. His ...”

“... want to stick to literature – a hard enough category to circumscribe – you can’t. Plato and Aristotle, whose discussions of mimesis started the ball rolling, were concerned with the way poets imitated reality, rather than their imitation of other authors. That somewhat narrower question emerged from the Roman rhetorical tradition, which is why literary ...”

“... it, towards a pit, is a group of scholars and dignitaries, chiefly churchmen, headed by the Pope. Aristotle, the scholastics’ darling, is tumbling into the pit to join Plato, his pagan philosophical predecessor. The lesson is clear: Scripture and Scripture only is what counts. All things necessary for salvation are contained in it, accessible to all who ...”

“... began in the 17th century, she thinks, when Protestantism (which she associates, incredibly, with Aristotle and a ‘strictly materialist episteme’) tried to annihilate the ‘Neoplatonic’ spiritual world of gnosis, epiphany and synaesthesia. But the victory of Western materialism was an illusion, apparently, and our spiritual side simply withdrew for a ...”

“... essentialism (of which more presently) has striking affinities with the metaphysical Realism of Aristotle and Augustine. True, we sometimes presuppose more logic than you’re likely to come across on the omnibus to Clapham. But I’m told that an intelligent reading of Heidegger requires knowing more about Kant, Hegel and the Pre-Socratics than I, for ...”

“... a lucid reconstruction and rehearsal of the old answers he shows the limits of their appeal. For Aristotle, tragedy pleases us because we know it isn’t real, and the artist’s formal control of his material reinforces our own sense of control, what Nuttall calls ‘our secure sovereignty’. Against Aristotle’s formal ...”

“... pathology, the world of 18th-century sexual-counselling literature seems unthreatening enough. Aristotle’s Masterpiece – not by Aristotle at all but an anonymous, very long-lived, much re-edited, 17th-century mélange of folk wisdom, medical knowledge and social commonplaces – and the French physician Nicolas ...”

“... therefore, is why he abandoned a subject of which he was one of the greatest practitioners since Aristotle in favour of one to which he had very little of any value to contribute. In Monk’s view, a certain kind of ‘civilised’ (i.e. liberal) ideal has been replaced by its opposite – John Stuart Mill has turned into the Ayatollah. If Russell’s ...”

“... has to say about such matters.The ideal of the rule of law did not, of course, begin with Fuller. Aristotle referred in his Politics to forms of democracy where ‘the law rules,’ and distinguished them from communities where a ‘popular leader’ is in charge. This is a powerful rhetorical contrast but, as Waldron points out, it is also a dubious ...”