“... 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 ...”

“... passions and habits to beasts, and this is part of the religious myth of humanity that comes from Plato into the Christian tradition. This world picture, contributing to human self-assurance, prevented men educated in our traditions from seeing the biosphere as it is, until very recently. In fact, civilised human beings are remarkable among animal species for ...”

“... of brilliant pages Hartman links Lukacs’s early essay on the essay form with Walter Pater’s Plato and Platonism, and both with the ‘romantic irony’ of Schlegel. Although Hartman would not admit himself to the select company of those who have written the essay as ‘intellectual poem’ – apart from Schlegel, and sometimes Benjamin, it includes ...”

“... limits. The doctors propagated the theory of female ejaculation and the wandering womb. Plato wanted an equal role for women – allowing for their inferiority in all things. Aristotle, as always a backer of the actual, thought the male fitter to command than the female. Against this background stand a few prominent figures or individual utterances ...”

“... Historians have identified a variety of sources for Campanella’s idiosyncratic vision, from Plato to Thomas More. What no one before Noel Malcolm noticed – although it would be unmistakable to any student of the early modern Middle East – is the extent to which the city of the sun was modelled on the Ottoman Empire.From the Renaissance to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... disobedience. Anyone, Cavell says in a recent essay, ‘The Good of Film’, can see the drama of Plato’s Apology, the doomed Socrates facing his stubborn or uncomprehending accusers.* And anyone can see the dramas, large and small, that Hollywood films lay out for us. But does anyone steadily see what we do to each other all the time? This is Cavell’s ...”

“... Fuller’s book is a mixture of peppy prose and convoluted argument. The discussion moves from Plato to Nato and back again, with dizzying speed and an extraordinary density of citation. (The bibliography contains about 600 publications, including 44 by Fuller himself, and the text more than nine hundred mostly discursive footnotes.) The tone is almost ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and techniques. Architects owe more to the legacy of Demosthenes and Cicero than to that of Plato and Aristotle, and perhaps that should be recognised in their schools. Out they go onto the stage, dancing and playing with words and distorting them, yet applauded by us because we hope that it will help them refashion the old mixture of beauty, utility ...”

“... is quite wrong and needs radical revision. The great revisionists have been philosophers like Plato, Leibniz and Berkeley, weavers of fantastical metaphysical speculations. Descriptive metaphysics began in effect with Kant, and has been much in vogue ever since. Indeed, many modern analytic philosophers have rejected revisionary metaphysics altogether as ...”

“... previously an all too canonical discipline – in which a phalanx of political philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Marx and Mill engaged in a common pursuit across the centuries – gave way to the insight that political philosophers, just as much as hack pamphleteers, were often responding to immediate issues. Contextualism moved political thought in ...”

“... Morality in the 18th Century.* The book traces the history of the concept of moral beauty from Plato and Plotinus, through Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and into Kant, Schiller and Goethe. Norton explores the way this concept merged with Pietist religious traditions in German-speaking countries and suffused their moral culture. Simply put, the idea was that ...”