“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Liar paradox, or who regards Principia Mathematica as the greatest contribution to Logic since Aristotle, would be well advised to attempt the task.) Levy’s story of Moore’s life ends in 1918, when Moore had at least half of his philosophical career ahead of him, while his account of the years before 1918 focuses upon the Apostles to an extent that ...”

“... need for some general machinery which integrates all the resulting information, presumably what Aristotle intended by his idea of a ‘common sense’. It is rather harder, however, to establish decisive evidence in favour of Fodor’s detailed plans. On the one hand, damage to certain areas of the brain disrupts the memory for all types of immediate ...”

“... adult. After some unimpressive cross-cultural comparisons we return to Greece at a later date. For Aristotle, the ephebeia was a two-year period of military service which young men undertook immediately after admission to the deme lists. It consisted of garrison duty ‘on the frontier’ (between Nature and Culture, between Savagery and Civilisation, between ...”

“... signor Contino to himself as he waited on a railway station in Vienna. Freud, our era’s peer to Aristotle in analytic imagination and an informed Classicist, agreed with Aristotle’s Poetics in placing Sophocles’s Oedipus the King at the centre and summit of Greek tragedy. Yet Greek mythology provides another ...”

“... of the ordinary bodies can be seductive, too, especially when confined to stories and images: as Aristotle points out in the Poetics, we enjoy representations of insects and corpses; we also thrill to horrible creatures – boggarts, bogles, guhls in the Middle East, bunyips in Australia – which would frighten and disgust us if we ever encountered ...”

“... Theoretically, the claim is that things could be different. They were in that community which Aristotle described – a community in which all the citizens could collect where they could see and hear each other – and they are, too, in those communities which Louis Dumont describes, with India in mind – communities in which individuals were or are not ...”

“... stories if you like, joined together in the middle: a story not a plot, because it does not follow Aristotle’s rules, though it does have quite a turn-up in the middle. Act I: Scientia/Knowledge. The emergence of an intellectual: not exactly Faust – though St Bernard would think so and Clanchy at one point speaks of Abelard as ‘gambling against his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the other two. Pecuniary anthropology is very, very perilous. In the absence of evidence, both Aristotle and Adam Smith made implausible conjectures about the origin of money. Bernstein rushes right in after them. Because gold must be mined, panned or dredged and often only with great difficulty, because it throws back light, doesn’t rust at all, is ...”

“... the physiology of sight. He has a tendency to recount the discoveries of modern science when Aristotle would be more to the point, and he seriously underestimates the number of people executed for witchcraft in early modern Europe. But these defects, like the fact that neither Ekirch nor the many people who read this book in draft have ever, it ...”

“... demand. In practice, the demand for clarity becomes a call for greater precision. Yet, as Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.’ Or, to quote the aphorist James Richardson, ‘past a certain point, more precision ...”

“... of satisfaction – what the late Martin Hollis called ‘microwatts of inner glow’ – not, as Aristotle did, as a harmony between character, deliberation, action and circumstance. For Aristotle, being ‘happy’ (the usual translation of eudaimon) depends on a disposition to make correct practical judgments. It also ...”

“... by overwork and retributively blinded like Milton’s Samson. These setbacks change his views (Aristotle would call this anagnorisis) and open him to the sense of hope brought in the closing lines by partnership with Aurora, who describes to him a vision of the New Jerusalem. Prins shares Aurora’s ability to extrapolate from particular griefs to the ...”