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 ...

Bird-man swallows human

David Craig: Birds’ Eggs, 20 October 2016

The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and outside) a Bird’s Egg 
by Tim Birkhead.
Bloomsbury, 288 pp., £16.99, April 2016, 978 1 4088 5125 8
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... of what a bird’s egg is. History is attended to in the citations of eminent ornithologists, from Aristotle onwards, that open most of the chapters. Birkhead covers the shape of eggs, their colouring, the function of albumen in keeping microbes at bay, fertilisation, laying, incubation and hatching. He tells us, for example, that the dimpled space at the ...

Short Cuts

Frederick Wilmot-Smith: Environmental Law, 8 February 2018

... that is common to the greatest number of owners receives the least attention,’ Aristotle wrote in the Politics, because ‘they think less of it on the ground that someone else is thinking about it.’ It has been easy enough until now to let the European Union (and ClientEarth) think about environmental law for us. Once the UK leaves the ...

Searching for the Bee

Helen Pfeifer: Rarities and Marvels, 30 November 2023

‘Wonders and Rarities’: The Marvellous Book that Travelled the World and Mapped the Cosmos 
by Travis Zadeh.
Harvard, 445 pp., £33.95, October, 978 0 674 25845 7
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... many in manuscript form, and traces them back to their Greek origins in the works of Apollonius, Aristotle, Galen and Pythagoras, to name but a few. Indeed, he faces the mammoth task of mastering the same range of disciplines as Qazwini himself, from alchemy to botany, philosophy, theology and zoology. These feats are themselves worthy of wonder.Qazwini’s ...
Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics 
by Annette Baier.
Harvard, 368 pp., £33.95, February 1994, 0 674 58715 4
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... may be the best historical study of ethical ideas in recent decades, Williams says that Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel are all on the same side, all believing in one way or another that the universe, or history, or the structure of human reason can, when properly understood, yield a pattern which makes sense of human life and human aspirations. Sophocles ...

I Don’t Know Whats

Colin Burrow: Torquato Tasso, 22 February 2001

Jerusalem Delivered 
by Torquato Tasso, translated by Anthony Esolen.
Johns Hopkins, 490 pp., £50.50, November 2000, 0 8018 6322 8
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... the moon in order to bring back Orlando’s wits in a jar. This is gloriously irreconcilable with Aristotle’s insistence that fictions be verisimilar (or ‘the kinds of thing which could occur’). Butting together the free-wheeling I-can-do-anything-watch-me-while-I-fly-to-the-moon zeal of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso with a theory of unity which was both ...

Like a Top Hat

Jonathan Rée: Morality without the Metaphysics, 8 February 2024

Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography 
by Émile Perreau-Saussine, translated by Nathan J. Pinkoski.
Notre Dame, 197 pp., £36, September 2022, 978 0 268 20325 2
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... London. He seems to have been a docile student, happy to be guided through the works of Plato and Aristotle in the original Greek, and if he ran into problems – not unlikely for a solitary 16-year-old Presbyterian from Glasgow – he didn’t mention them. (This experiment in autobiography was, like all MacIntyre’s work, lucid, clever and brisk, but also ...

Pseuds’ Skyscraper

Mark Lilla, 5 June 1997

The Ethical Function of Architecture 
by Karsten Harries.
MIT, 414 pp., £29.95, January 1997, 0 262 08252 7
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... depths of Heideggerian ontology and return to the modest but potentially more fruitful discipline Aristotle called political ...

Driving Force

Stuart Hampshire, 19 June 1980

Life Chances 
by Ralf Dahrendorf.
Weidenfeld, 181 pp., £8.95, January 1980, 0 297 77682 7
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... for Fortune – that ancient irreducible element in practical human affairs, coldly noted by Aristotle, elaborated, and dwelt on with a sort of voluptuousness, by Machiavelli. He who loves politics, and has the essence of the matter in him, loves and studies the uncertain play of Fortune, the sudden, irrational leap of a precipitating ...
Criticism in the University 
edited by Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons.
Northwestern, 234 pp., £29.95, September 1985, 0 8101 0670 1
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... a conclusion is not likely. But this has nothing to do with Ancients and Moderns. Literalists like Aristotle and Dr Johnson occur in all ages; so do allegorists like Origen and Blake; and two of the most determined allegorists, Marx and Freud, are guiding spirits of the modern period. More to the point is to ask how illuminating and how fruitful different ...

Joinedupwritingwithavengeance

Danny Karlin, 7 January 1993

Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West 
by M.B. Parkes.
Scolar, 327 pp., £55, September 1992, 0 85967 742 7
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... were invented that we might be able to converse even with the absent,’ and who followed Aristotle in seeing written words as the ‘signs of sounds’, with Isidore of Seville, three centuries later, who, saw letters as having ‘the power to convey to us silently the sayings of those who are absent’. Isidore’s view of writing silences both ...

So far so Bletchley Park

John Ray, 8 June 1995

Deciphering the Indus Script 
by Asko Parpola.
Cambridge, 374 pp., £60, September 1994, 0 521 43079 8
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The World on Paper 
by David Olson.
Cambridge, 318 pp., £17.95, May 1994, 0 521 44311 3
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... perspective. Olson is a cognitive scientist, and a brave man. ‘Contrary to writers from Aristotle to Saussure,’ he tells us towards the end of the book, ‘I have argued that writing is not transcription of speech but rather provides a model for speech; we introspect language in terms laid down by our scripts.’ In other words, writing determines ...

Coup-Contrecoup

Rahmane Idrissa, 24 February 2022

... makes little difference to the armed jihadist groups whose activities are the efficient cause, as Aristotle would have it, of the coups in both countries, even if their roots go much deeper. For the two main jihadist outfits, the al-Qaida-affiliated Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) and the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP), the theatre ...