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“... the Victorian resolutely refuses to behave in the way we think Victorians should: Swinburne read Plato under Jowett at Balliol, but he also read Sade with Monckton Milnes at Fryston Hall. Investigation does not reveal that assurance, certitude or consensus we have invented in order to guide us in our present jam. The figures that appear in this landscape are ...”

“... not obscure the fact that these banal contentions are froth on the surface of some powerful tides. Plato in the Ion finds it worth while to spend a whole dialogue on demolishing the ill-founded pretensions of a professor of literature. Two key passages in the Republic are concerned with the place of poetry in the education of the guardians – the second of ...”

“... interpretative power with their readers. Socrates complains of this surrender of authority in Plato’s Phaedrus: a writing cannot correct a mistaken reading of itself, cannot impose its authority on the reader, cannot answer back. The history of punctuation is in part the history of authors’ attempts to wrest power from readers, and of ...”

“... but also the subtlety of the issues he is analysing comes from his claim that Nietzsche is playing Plato to his own Socrates. Like Nietzsche himself, Nehamas is by training and profession a specialist in ancient Greek thought. A philosopher with a PhD from Princeton and now teaching at the University of Pennsylvania after several years at the University of ...”

“... had managed to evade her doctor’s disapproval of too much weighty reading, since ‘luckily my Plato looks as good as a novel on the outside,’ was a woman whose prose style was thick with casual quotation and paraphrase; the three and a half pages of the Plato letter alone require more than two pages of single-spaced ...”

“... as is Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot.One scoreline in the Yale Book is the most revealing of all: Plato 11, Mark Twain 154. The equivalent figures in the 2014 Oxford Dictionary are Plato 18, Twain 34. Twain spoke and wrote to be quoted, as did epigones of his such as H.L. Mencken, whose Little Book in C Major scores 13 in ...”

“... the melody of his language is the most intense that it is possible to conceive,’ Shelley says of Plato in his polemic A Defence of Poetry; he translated the Symposium, and once said he would rather be damned with Plato and Bacon than go to heaven with the Anglican worthies Paley and Malthus. ‘You know that I always seek ...”

“... Violence (plebeians at it again), and so on to Citizenship (more discipline required for taming of Plato’s ‘savage beast’ or the Selbournian equivalent – ‘the universal plebeian’). The manifestly sombre tone of the contest is heightened by Selbourne’s technique. This is a man who comes out punching and never stops from one gong to the ...”

“... we owe the notion of the separation of reason from passion, the idea that the human soul is as Plato brilliantly describes it in his dialogue Phaedrus, like a charioteer trying to control a chariot pulled by two horses, one good and one bad. The connection between destructive passion and animals is expressed in the earliest Greek texts. Passion ...”

“... with examples that range easily from Job to Jakobson, Hillel and Horace to Dickens and Dickinson, Plato to Wittgenstein, Aeschylus to Ashbery. And he returns to the essay’s origin by adopting georgic digression as his structural principle. Philosophers’ questions lead to questions answered by questions; self-questionings lead on to closure by ...”

“... barely related lines of thought. Vitruvius and the Vitruvians loom large, but so do Aristotle, Plato and Hegel. A routine summary of Alberti, Serlio and Palladio is spiced with excursions into Fréart de Chantelou, Quatremère de Quincy and Diego da Sagredo. Le Brun’s physiognomic drawings are set in the context of Cartesian psychology and the cult of ...”

“... in the invisible, spiritual world. He is no disciple of Ficino, and behind the myth of the Cave in Plato, Erasmus located, not the secret verities of the prisca theologia, but the divine realities disclosed in Scripture to which the Risen Christ was the only guide. Neither does he yield to the temptation to spiritualise the body, nor to downgrade the ...”

“... Mr Williams has not advanced, or lapsed, so far as this, being still more under the influence of Plato than of Heraclitus. Apart from the essays already mentioned, there are articles on persons and their character, on Justice, on ‘ought’ and moral obligation, and on what Mr Williams calls practical necessity. Outside moral philosophy there is an essay on ...”

“... concepts traced are those that surface in the formulations of ‘experts’ and thinkers, from Plato to Chomsky. This would not matter it covert and overt linguistic theories in a single culture were similar, but notoriously they are not, and indeed Harris makes use of the difference in contrasting the generally pretheoretical semantics of monoglot ...”

“... psychologists have such a down on minds. Psychologists, of all people. In philosophy, ever since Plato, the mainstream opinion has been that the mind is the organ of thought; thinking is what the mind is for, and we act as we do because we think what we do. But psychologists, for the last hundred years or so, have mostly viewed that sort of ...”