“... by the sources.Oriental despotism is one such blinding trope. With its roots in the work of Aristotle, the notion that Eastern monarchies were inherently oppressive was revived in 16th-century Europe to explain what some contemporaries understood to be the unchecked power of the Ottoman sultan. Whereas Western Christians exercised freedom, so the theory ...”

“... 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 ...”

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

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with a probing arm or two, and sometimes lead them by the hand on a tour of the neighbourhood. Aristotle, mistaking curiosity for a lack of intelligence, called the octopus a ‘stupid creature’ because of its willingness to approach an extended human hand. Octopuses can recognise individual humans, and will respond differently to different ...”

“... men, the giants of thought, who formed his mind. What is he to do in this moment of crisis, pull Aristotle or Spinoza from the shelf and storm through the pages looking for consolation and advice? Rather archly, perhaps, Bellow went on to smile at the simplicity of some of his public: Certain readers of Herzog complained the book was difficult. Much as ...”

“... dreams of going on holiday to Greece, where he would like to visit Stagira, ‘the birthplace of Aristotle, I’d run around the track at Olympia, run in my underwear’. Hanta doesn’t take baths because he suspects them of spreading disease, ‘but sometimes, when a yearning for the Greek ideal of beauty comes over me, I’ll wash one of my feet or maybe ...”

“... university’s influence over Ruskin College as exhorting the workers: ‘Back to Plato! Back to Aristotle!’ Yet the name of their movement was inspired by De Leon’s lectures on Roman history. Early issues of Plebs included a series of articles on Greek and Roman economic development by William Craik, a railway worker from South Wales who had enrolled at ...”

“... of information about male homosexuality in historical order; after sections about Plato and Aristotle, she jumps four centuries to Plutarch’s dialogue on love, and then to epigrams in the Greek Anthology, some dating from the Hellenistic age, but others from the Imperial or even the Byzantine period, the novel of Achilles Tatius, and finally the ...”

“... with Derrida and Foucault, Wordsworth is more useful than Mill or Russell, Rilke more useful than Aristotle or Hegel. And he is certainly right that ‘when Wordsworth and Hölderlin describe the natural world around us, they no longer play on an established gamut of references, as Pope could still do in Windsor Forest. They make us aware of something in ...”

“... to be shocked and angry, and almost certainly unable to measure your response so judiciously. Like Aristotle, McGinn thinks it possible to distinguish just from unjust anger. But rational morality should nevertheless allow for the fact that quite a lot of rationally unsound human behaviour results from people being shocked or angry, perhaps only momentarily ...”

“... differs from, say, that of Greek tragedy, caused the underlying unity which was already clear to Aristotle and has been clear to the vast majority of unbiased readers to receive less attention than the real or fancied inconsistencies. Secondly, the discovery of Minoan and Mycenaean civilisation by the archaeologists induced an excessive preoccupation with ...”

“... He is now ‘tired of his mind’ and tired of pilosophy, in which ‘everything went wrong since Aristotle.’ But he is still a moralist, and what he fears most is ‘to find out that morality is unreal’. Evidently (there’s some guesswork to be done) this is what he does find out at the crisis of his relations with his granddaughter. He has already ...”

“... you assumed you understood, humility follows on the unsurprising discovery that things which gave Aristotle … serious problems are lying about in your own head, like unopened mail waiting to be dealt with.’ Bodies and clothes: ‘Bodies differ from place to place and race to race, from person to person and from fat times to lean. Clothes battle against ...”