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“... best was at the poet Carl Rakosi’s house. It was many years ago, but I think he touched on Plato, Beethoven, Milton, Tom Thumb, Lysistrata, the genus Asterias (starfish) and the song ‘Penny Lane’. The larger conceptual point eluded me at the time. Olson, I’m told, would pontificate for hours on end – on his theory of Projective ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... need to pay to watch a game.’ The citizens enthusiastically attend philosophy classes at night. Plato’s theory of forms seems to be a popular preoccupation: ‘We were asking ourselves,’ says the teacher, ‘what unity lies behind all the diversity, what it is that makes all tables tables, all chairs chairs.’ Simón struggles with this enlightened ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as the theme will bear: there is no further point in being glum about them, or calling upon Plato to support your saying that it is ‘a dangerous thing to treat people as actors because they tend to lose any secure sense of their own authenticity’. The most interesting parts of Coasting are the technical bits about winds, tides, what to do with the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by ‘questions’ without practical, or even comprehensible, answers: the questions not of a Plato but of a sophist, playing for ethical time. Selbourne’s standards of practicality can be guessed from his thoughts about how to cure one current social ill: the unwillingness of many young men to provide for the babies they beget. He says (plausibly ...”

“... rip-off of O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and Desire Under the Elms, with dashes of Plato and Rousseau and Camus thrown in. We have legal opinions, complaints, answers to complaints, depositions, more opinions, all done with admirable, patient attention to the detail and manner of the language of the law, touched with parodies and ...”

“... gorgeous nonsense, which isn’t an insult, since gorgeous nonsense is what Coleridge once accused Plato of writing, perhaps with the Timaeus in mind. The prevalence and variety of apocalyptic thought in modern America is well illustrated in Paul Boyer’s book, When Time Shall Be No More (1992), which is specially interesting on the phenomenon known as the ...”

“... anthology and described as ‘the culmination of the great utopian tradition that starts with Plato’. Hitler, after all, would have had no trouble endorsing Wells’s chilling prophecy that the men of the New Republic will not be squeamish, either, in facing or inflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense of the possibilities of life than we ...”

“... does he berate his heroes for not meekly submitting to the divine will: not before the time of Plato do Greeks try to determine what the gods want and condemn any opposition to it.Sophoclean heroes are human beings whose great qualities lead them to behave, so far as they are able, like gods. Mortals cannot do this with impunity, as characters who lack ...”

“... If you have, let us say, a theory about man, and if you can only prove it by talking about Plato and George Washington, your theory may be quite a frivolous thing. But if you can prove it by talking about the butler or the postman, then it is serious, because it is universal. So far from it being irreverent to use silly metaphors on serious ...”