“... 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 ...”

“... philosophical – he published books on Hume, Spinoza, Kant, Leibniz and Nietzsche, and essays on Plato and Heidegger, among others – this impression rapidly fades once one begins to read some of the other books he wrote. The two best known of these, co-written with Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, are not easy to categorise: they range ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... developed two main branches. The first, institutionalised in the Academy, the school which Plato had established a century earlier and from which this approach – Academic Scepticism – received its name, flourished from the third until the first century BC. Much of our information about it comes from Cicero’s Academica, written in the first ...”

“... you?’ Wilson was the son of a lawyer, a bit chilly, a prodigious reader steeped in Plato and Dante. He thought Fitzgerald’s remark foolish – just what you might expect from a man who had been reading novelists like Booth Tarkington and H.G. Wells. But Wilson respected Fitzgerald’s ardour; he believed that was how a young man of talent ...”

“... age, the proving ground of self and nation. ‘Only the dead have seen the end of war.’ So said Plato, at least according to General MacArthur, the Imperial War Museum and Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down. It’s not clear that Plato did say this, but regardless of the statement’s provenance, its constant iteration ...”

“... inclusivity. In his chapter on birds’ names a mention of Shakespeare prompts a reference to Plato, followed by John Stuart Mill, with George Orwell and Lewis Carroll bringing up the rear. Then come ten sections on the naming of birds, the ninth dealing with those named after people. He mentions my favourite of these, the ground-dwelling forest cisticola ...”

“... guardians overseeing an educational system and division of labour strikingly reminiscent of Plato’s republic (although goodness knows what Plato would have made of the myths of the Catholic Church when compared and contrasted with his own). Examples are to be had of producers’ co-operatives, self-governing ...”

“... guarantor of social order. He started with the ‘rational theory of the state’ as set out in Plato’s Republic, and traced its development through the theology of the Middle Ages and the worldly realism of the Renaissance to the enlightened 18th century, where, as he saw it, philosophers had at last summoned up the courage to ‘think against their own ...”

“... and situates her experience of bouleversement within a history of aesthetics that runs from Plato through Kant to Weil and Wittgenstein. Smith’s own conversion to Mitchell ‘arrives as if out of nowhere’, but in fact comes from her well-readied mind, from her education in aesthetics as a discourse of overturned detachment. Felski doesn’t discuss ...”

“... prose piece. The scholar takes over for a bit, telling us of Arab references to Iflatun (Plato) and about the pronunciation of Aphaca as Afa’a for the hideous reason that modern Arabic has dropped the Koph or letter ‘Q’. How did they dare? He visits the shrine of Astarte (Venus) and meets the men who discreetly sell water bottled from her ...”

“... thought. The other line, the humanist line, slightly lower, but strictly parallel, begins with Plato and continues straight to Hegel, who puts ideas into history, sees history as rational. The 19th century is Hegelian: history is going somewhere – towards a Super-State, or (in a more liberal context) the happiness of the greatest number. This is the ...”