Existence Unperceived

W.D. Hart, 15 October 1981

Philosophical Subjects: Essays Presented to P.F. Strawson 
edited by Zak van Straaten.
Oxford, 302 pp., £12.50, November 1980, 9780198246039
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... of Proper Names’, L. Jonathan Cohen argues that, for example, one and the same name, ‘Aristotle’, denotes both the ancient philosopher and the modern ship-owner. This leads him to a meta-linguistic theory of naming: whether ‘Cicero denounced Cataline’ is true will depend on how Cicero is named. That in turn leads him to the conclusion that ...

Avoiding Colin

Frank Kermode, 6 August 1992

Moral Literacy: Or how to do the right thing 
by Colin McGinn.
Duckworth, 110 pp., £6.99, July 1992, 0 7156 2417 2
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The Space Trap 
by Colin McGinn.
Duckworth, 187 pp., £14.99, July 1992, 0 7156 2415 6
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... 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 ...

Seeing Things

Catherine Wilson: Egg and sperm and preformation, 21 May 1998

The Ovary of Eve: Egg and Sperm and Preformation 
by Clara Pinto-Correia.
Chicago, 396 pp., £23.95, November 1997, 0 226 66952 1
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... new life was constantly appearing, there manifestly was a God. The most acute observers, including Aristotle, had always given preformation short shrift. ‘Epigenesis’ – the gradual emergence of embryonic organs and structures from an undifferentiated state of matter, under the controlling action of a local formative agent – could be directly inferred ...

Peter Campbell

Mary-Kay Wilmers: On Peter Campbell, 17 November 2011

... 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 ...

What’s the problem with critical art?

Hal Foster: Rancière’s Aesthetics, 10 October 2013

Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art 
by Jacques Rancière, translated by Zakir Paul.
Verso, 272 pp., £20, June 2013, 978 1 78168 089 6
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... and served the ethical development of the community. In the representative regime, outlined by Aristotle but codified only in the 17th and 18th centuries, ‘the intelligibility of human actions’ became the central criterion of art, which made the refinement of mimesis its essential task. To this end the liberal arts were separated from the ...

Diary

Mark Mazower: In Thessaloniki, 22 November 2012

... Golden Dawn’s thugs than with the general lack of money. In the quiet tree-lined roads west of Aristotle Square, largely inhabited by the Georgians and Black Sea Greeks who arrived after the Soviet breakup, things were quiet and the people on the streets looked thin. As well as more orthodox activities, the crisis has hit the gun-running and drugs business ...

Weavers and Profs

Katherine Harloe, 1 April 2021

A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939 
by Edith Hall and Henry Stead.
Routledge, 670 pp., £29.99, March 2020, 978 0 367 43236 2
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... 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 ...

Death in Cumbria

Alan Macfarlane, 19 May 1983

Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 
by Keith Thomas.
Allen Lane, 426 pp., £14.95, March 1983, 0 7139 1227 8
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... realisation that the natural world had a life of its own ... ’ The view was fully propounded in Aristotle. Furthermore, although attempts were made to classify things in a non-anthropocentric way, Thomas shows that Linnaeus himself classified dogs by their human uses, and even today lawyers impose human criteria on animals. Likewise, though there was a ...

Rat Poison

David Bromwich, 17 October 1996

Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Beacon, 143 pp., $20, February 1996, 0 8070 4108 4
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... philosophy could have made us think otherwise. Her evidence covers a wide range, from Plato and Aristotle to Proust and Henry James, and though she takes a critical interest in thinkers, mostly of the Stoic tradition, who have promoted the rival virtues of self-sufficiency, she writes to call attention to those who preach and practise sympathy. These ...

What is rude?

Thomas Nagel: Midgley, Murdoch, Anscombe, Foot, 10 February 2022

The Women Are up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch Revolutionised Ethics 
by Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb.
Oxford, 326 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 0 19 754107 4
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Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life 
by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman.
Chatto, 398 pp., £25, February, 978 1 78474 328 4
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... behind considerations of what makes human lives go well or badly – the foundations on which Aristotle and Aquinas built their whole theories. It can’t be done.The content-neutral analysis of moral language fails at the linguistic level, but that is because the disconnect between fact and value on which it is based is false, and our language recognises ...

How to be a wife

Colm Tóibín: The Discretion of Jackie Kennedy, 6 June 2002

Janet & Jackie: The Story of a Mother and Her Daughter, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis 
by Jan Pottker.
St Martin’s, 381 pp., $24.95, October 2001, 0 312 26607 3
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Mrs Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years 
by Barbara Leaming.
Weidenfeld, 389 pp., £20, October 2001, 0 297 64333 9
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... oral sex’ he ever had. Between the assassination of Kennedy in November 1963 and her marriage to Aristotle Onassis in October 1968, Jacqueline Kennedy’s life had much in common with that of the governess in The Turn of the Screw, constantly frightened by ghosts, apparitions and fresh horrors. She had two beautiful small children in her care, and she took ...

Being there

Ian Hamilton, 7 October 1993

Up at Oxford 
by Ved Mehta.
Murray, 432 pp., £17.99, September 1993, 0 7195 5287 7
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... discussion of the distinction between the spiritual and the physical. They quoted Plato, Aristotle and Virgil, in Greek and Latin, and threw out definitions and manipulated words and phrases. Such discussions could take place only at Oxford, I thought. It’s so English. People here are so intelligent.’ And these were just the students. Next he had ...

Instant Depths

Michael Wood, 7 July 1994

The Cryptogram 
by David Mamet.
The Ambassador's Theatre
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A Whore’s Profession: Notes and Essays 
by David Mamet.
Faber, 412 pp., £12.99, June 1994, 0 571 17076 5
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... whatever knowledge he’s got. He is a lapsed Talmudist, as he says; he tells his students about Aristotle, Occam, Trollope, Bettelheim; he likes to turn his experience, any experience, into maxims. ‘“Is God dead?” and “Why are there no real movies any more?” are pretty much the same question.’ Really? This is a little too snappy, like the ...

Mix ’n’ match

Roy Porter, 19 January 1989

The Essential Book of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Vol. I: Theory 
by Liu Yanchi, translated by Fang Tingyu and Chen Laidi.
Columbia, 305 pp., $40, April 1988, 9780231061964
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The Essential Book of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Vol. II: Clinical Practice 
by Liu Yanchi, translated by Fang Tingyu and Chen Laidi.
Columbia, 479 pp., £80, April 1988, 0 231 06518 3
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Traditional Medicine in Contemporary China 
by Nathan Sivin.
University of Michigan Centre for Chinese Studies, 549 pp., $22.50, September 1987, 0 89264 073 1
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... to consciousness? Precisely like a late-Medieval Scholastic summa, blithely unifying Plato and Aristotle, Greek thought and the Bible by dint of verbal gymnastics, the Essential Book does its manful best to pretend that everything in the garden is rosy, and that no fundamental incompatibilities divide the Chinese tradition and those elements of Western ...

Feel the burn

Jenny Diski: Pain, 30 September 1999

Pain: The Science of Suffering 
by Patrick Wall.
Weidenfeld, 186 pp., £12.99, July 1999, 0 297 84255 2
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... mental processing of received messages: ‘That route has been taken for two thousand years, from Aristotle to John Searle and Daniel Dennett. Pain has been used repeatedly as the simplest possible example of a physical stimulus which inevitably results in a mental response. We will not retrace this route, dropping the names of Bacon, Hume, Berkeley, Kant and ...