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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... depths of Heideggerian ontology and return to the modest but potentially more fruitful discipline Aristotle called political ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for the fact that there are few if any references to the giant bones in the writings of such as Aristotle. Her idea is that he and others like him would have regarded them as anomalies, monstrous manifestations that did not fit into their systems of classification. The fossils may even have been tainted by their association with the easily amazed common ...”

“... Edna was ‘one of the three people on the planet whom she loved most’. Jackie’s new husband, Aristotle Onassis, is thereafter discussed. Late one night a certain film producer was walking down Fifth Avenue with a very pretty young girl, when they chanced to meet Onassis walking the dog. They were invited up, and Jackie, who was preparing for bed, was ...”

“... brilliant attempt to undo what Descartes had done and substitute a view of human beings more like Aristotle’s. Aristotle, Ryle thought, had sensibly seen that to talk about someone’s mind is to talk about features of her intellect and character, not to talk about something incorporeal mysteriously lodged within ...”