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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The best thing therefore is love, the disposition, Scheler said, which Plato and Augustine and Pascal had been talking about, the aspiration to Einsfühling, a feeling-at-one-with, not the thin ‘sympathy’, reasoned ‘altruism’, and formal ‘obligation’ of the Enlightenment. This love fixes itself on ideals or models of ...”