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Thomas Jones: Hitler’s Last Day, 7 May 2015

... 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 ...

Someone might go into the past

A.J. Ayer, 5 January 1989

... 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 ...

Consider the Stork

Katherine Rundell, 1 April 2021

... 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 ...

Don’t break that fiddle

Tobias Gregory: Eclectic Imitators, 19 November 2020

Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity 
by Colin Burrow.
Oxford, 470 pp., £36.99, May 2019, 978 0 19 883808 1
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How the Classics Made Shakespeare 
by Jonathan Bate.
Princeton, 361 pp., £15.99, October 2020, 978 0 691 21014 8
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... 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 ...

Simply Doing It

Thomas Laqueur, 22 February 1996

The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain 1650-1950 
by Roy Porter and Lesley Hall.
Yale, 414 pp., £19.95, January 1995, 0 300 06221 4
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... 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 ...

Homage to Tyndale

J.B. Trapp, 17 December 1992

Tyndale’s New Testament 
edited by David Daniell.
Yale, 429 pp., £18.95, September 1989, 0 300 04419 4
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Tyndale’s Old Testament, being the Pentateuch of 1530, Joshua to II Chronicles of 1537 and Jonah 
edited by David Daniell.
Yale, 643 pp., £25, October 1992, 0 300 05211 1
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... 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 ...

Getting Even

Adam Phillips, 19 September 1996

Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon 
by John Kerrigan.
Oxford, 404 pp., £40, April 1996, 0 19 812186 5
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Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? 
by A.D. Nuttall.
Oxford, 110 pp., £20, June 1996, 0 19 818371 2
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... 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 ...

Dealing with Disappointment

Adam Phillips: Bertrand Russell, 8 March 2001

Bertrand Russell 1921-70: The Ghost of Madness 
by Ray Monk.
Cape, 574 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 224 05172 5
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... 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 ...

Water’s water everywhere

Jerry Fodor, 21 October 2004

Kripke: Names, Necessity and Identity 
by Christopher Hughes.
Oxford, 247 pp., £35, January 2004, 0 19 824107 0
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... 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 ...

Francine-Machine

Jonathan Rée: Automata, 9 May 2002

Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen 
by Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak.
Getty, 416 pp., £30, February 2002, 0 89236 590 0
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The Secret Life of Puppets 
by Victoria Nelson.
Harvard, 350 pp., £20.50, February 2002, 0 674 00630 5
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Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life 
by Gaby Wood.
Faber, 278 pp., £12.99, March 2002, 0 571 17879 0
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... 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 ...

Good Vibrations

Frederick Wilmot-Smith: On the Rule of Law, 12 September 2024

Thoughtfulness and the Rule of Law 
by Jeremy Waldron.
Harvard, 326 pp., £37.95, December 2023, 978 0 674 29077 8
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... 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 ...

What next?

W.G. Runciman, 27 October 1988

Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History 
by Ernest Gellner.
Collins, 288 pp., £15, August 1988, 0 00 217178 3
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... of Western Europe in terms of continuities stretching back through Medieval Christendom to Rome, Aristotle and the pre-Socratics do well to be reminded just how tenuous those continuities are. The evolution from ‘primitive’ to ‘modern’ required much more than the displacement of religion and magic by science. It required a long intermediate stage in ...

We must think!

Jenny Turner: Hannah Arendt’s Islands, 4 November 2021

Hannah Arendt 
by Samantha Rose Hill.
Reaktion, 232 pp., £11.99, August 2021, 978 1 78914 379 9
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... also posts pictures of the contents of Arendt’s library – ‘all the old friends … Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Goethe, Rilke’, in the words of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendt’s former student and first biographer – as well as her manuscripts, typed then scribbled on and sometimes cut up and stuck back together: ‘One can almost see [her] … with ...

Jon Elster’s Brisk Meditations

Bernard Williams, 1 May 1980

Logic and Society 
by Jon Elster.
Wiley, 244 pp., £12.65, March 1978, 0 471 99549 5
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Ulysses and the Sirens 
by Jon Elster.
Cambridge/Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 240 pp., £9.75, May 1979, 0 521 22388 1
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... go under the title ‘Logic’, but little of it belongs to that science which was developed by Aristotle, the Scholastics, Frege, Russell and many hundreds of current practitioners who work in Schools of Philosophy, Linguistics, Mathematics or Economics. Among the many things that Hegel understood, logic in that sense – that is to say, the real sense ...

Not the man for it

John Bossy: The Death of Girolamo Savonarola, 20 April 2006

Scourge and Fire: Savonarola and Renaissance Italy 
by Lauro Martines.
Cape, 368 pp., £20, March 2006, 0 224 07252 8
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The Burning of the Vanities: Savonarola and the Borgia Pope 
by Desmond Seward.
Sutton, 320 pp., £20, March 2006, 0 7509 2981 2
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... those above and below. The activity of the new government was to be directed to what, following Aristotle and his Dominican mentor Thomas Aquinas, Savonarola called the common good. The ‘common good’ is a great soundbite, and Martines holds that only the self-interested – beneficiaries of corruption and tyranny – will stand against it. I ...

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