Fire the press secretary

Jerry Fodor, 28 April 2011

Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind 
by Robert Kurzban.
Princeton, 274 pp., £19.95, January 2011, 978 0 691 14674 4
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... 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 ...

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 ‘aesthetic’ respectively. The ethical regime, first articulated by Plato in The Republic, aimed to ensure that all images (this was an age before art was considered a distinct order) were properly founded and appropriately directed, that is, that they were concerned with ideal forms and served the ethical development of the ...

Thinking about Death

Michael Wood: Why does the world exist?, 21 March 2013

Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story 
by Jim Holt.
Profile, 307 pp., £12.99, June 2012, 978 1 84668 244 5
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... at all.’ Leslie is quietly confident about his theory, only a little rueful about the fact that Plato got there some time ago, and he sounds ‘almost pained’ when Holt suggests there is something religious about the idea. I feel constantly embarrassed by the idea that I ought to be attracted to my system because, well, wouldn’t it be lovely if it were ...

Serfs Who Are Snobs

Catherine Merridale: Aleksandr Nikitenko, 29 November 2001

Up from Serfdom: My Childhood and Youth in Russia 1804-24 
by Aleksandr Nikitenko, translated by Helen Saltz Jacobson.
Yale, 228 pp., £20, June 2001, 0 300 08414 5
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... of an individual and citizen.’ His favourite author was Plutarch, though he enjoyed Socrates and Plato as well, and devised a game to play with his friends called ‘Heroes and Orators’. With tastes like these, his future seemed guaranteed. ‘From my very first steps in school,’ he writes, ‘I wanted more than anything else to become a censor’ – in ...

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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... to extend the 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 ...

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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... of modern 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 ...

Bouncebackability

David Runciman: Athenian Democracy and Google, 29 January 2009

Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens 
by Josiah Ober.
Princeton, 342 pp., £17.95, November 2008, 978 0 691 13347 8
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... think of Athens like this only because we have been misled by the best-known ancient sources (from Plato on), which tended to talk up the failings of Athenian democracy and either overlooked or deliberately downplayed its strengths, including its adaptability and its durability. Modern-day ancient historians like Ober now believe they have enough direct ...

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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... yet lightheaded 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 ...

In search of the Reformation

M.A. Screech, 9 November 1989

The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation 
by Alistair McGrath.
Blackwell, 223 pp., £25, March 1987, 0 631 15144 3
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Pastor and Laity in the Theology of Jean Gerson 
by Catherine Brown.
Cambridge, 358 pp., £35, March 1987, 0 521 33029 7
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Collected Works of Erasmus: Vols XXVII and XXVIII 
edited by A.H.T. Levi.
Toronto, 322 pp., £65, February 1987, 0 8020 5602 4
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... may pass almost unperceived if the English fails to evoke, as the Latin does, specific echoes of Plato and St Paul. The Ciceronianus as edited and translated by Dr Betty Knott is particularly welcome, though a brute to translate since much centres on questions of Classical or Erasmian Latin usage. This translation seems at times too colloquial for the Latin ...

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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... as crucial 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 ...

Excessive Guffawing

Gerald Hammond: Laughter and the Bible, 16 July 1998

Laughter at the Foot of the Cross 
by M.A. Screech.
Allen Lane, 328 pp., £30, January 1998, 0 7139 9012 0
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... but interpretations piled on interpretations. As Screech demonstrates, Erasmus, drawing on Plato and St Paul, adhered to the idea that there were three levels of Man. There was not just the simple allegory of body and soul, but the multiple one of body, soul and spirit. And beyond Man ‘Erasmus held that the tripartite division belonged not only to ...
The Dancing Wu Li Masters 
by Gary Zukav.
Hutchinson, 352 pp., £4.50, October 1979, 0 09 139401 5
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... philosophical, religious or political views that range far beyond science itself. Did not Plato draw from the static perfections of geometry to justify the archaic authoritarianism of his Republic? Eighteenth-century divines claimed Newton as their ally for one scheme of Providence or another. Darwin’s theory of biological evolution was enlisted on ...

Nietzsche’s Centaur

Bernard Williams, 4 June 1981

Nietzsche on Tragedy 
by M.S. Silk and J.P. Stern.
Cambridge, 441 pp., £27.50, March 1981, 0 521 23262 7
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Nietzsche: A Critical Life 
by Ronald Hayman.
Weidenfeld, 424 pp., £18.50, March 1980, 0 297 77636 3
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Nietzsche. Vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art 
by Martin Heidegger, translated by David Farrell Krell.
Routledge, 263 pp., £11.50, March 1981, 0 7100 0744 2
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... knowledge. That same rationalistic optimism led inevitably to a depreciation of art, including Plato’s celebrated rejection of it. The Platonic consciousness, and the later forms of moralism which in various ways Nietzsche assimilated to it, could not stand the power of tragedy, nor the metaphysical conclusion which, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche ...

A Billion Years a Week

John Ziman, 19 September 1985

Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age 
by David Bolter and A.J. Ayer.
Duckworth, 264 pp., £12.95, October 1984, 0 7156 1917 9
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... the magic to be found in the diversity and uncertainty of reference of a natural language. As Plato appreciated, poetry is an oral medium, cooled by writing; Aristotle’s logical analysis froze the meanings into forms. A modern computer language such as FORTRAN or COBOL seems to realise Leibniz’s dream of an artificial language in which all ambiguity ...

The Wind Dog

Tom Paulin, 17 October 1996

... on his golden bough to sing that ancient salt is best packing that all that is mortal of great Plato there is stuck like chewed gum in Tess’s hair which happened – as it had to – before ever I seen those tinned kippers packed into boxes on the quayside in Cullercoats or Whitley Bay and my great aunt takes the penny ferry over the Tyne and my English ...