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Comet Mania

Simon Schaffer, 19 February 1981

The comet is coming! 
by Nigel Calder.
BBC, 160 pp., £8.75, November 1980, 0 563 17859 0
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... foretelling disaster for the great and change for the many, while medieval philosophers knew from Aristotle that they were exhalations expelled from the Earth like mists and fogs. Two kinds of books were written on the subject: titles like Cometomantia dealing with judicial astrology; titles like Meteorologia dealing with scholastic philosophy. At the ...

Resisting the avalanche

Bernard Williams, 6 June 1985

Ordinary Vices 
by Judith Shklar.
Harvard, 168 pp., £14.95, October 1984, 0 674 64175 2
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Immorality 
by Ronald Milo.
Princeton, 273 pp., £24.70, September 1984, 0 691 06614 0
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... and the author’s colleagues, so there is a good deal of, as it were, ‘this view is held by Aristotle, Trubshaw and, in his earlier article, Birnbacher.’ The most important weakness of Milo’s discussion, however, comes from its exclusive attachment to the notion of morality. This has two results, which together more or less kill off the inquiry ...

Unmatched Antiquary

Blair Worden, 21 February 1980

Sir Robert Cotton 1586-1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England 
by Kevin Sharpe.
Oxford, 293 pp., £12.50, November 1980, 9780198218777
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... of indivisible sovereignty) could intelligently weigh the authority of Polybius against that of Aristotle, Bodin’s against that of Tacitus. No one would describe Howard as a profound or original thinker, but his response to new intellectual influences seems to have been sharper than his client’s. There is no evidence that Cotton read Machiavelli. There ...

Fourth from the top

Martin Kemp, 1 December 1983

Collected Essays: Vols I and II 
by Frances Yates.
Routledge, 279 pp., £12.50, May 1982, 0 7100 0952 6
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... techniques of naturalistic representation in the visual arts. As Charles Schmitt’s recent Aristotle and the Renaissance underlines, the predominantly Aristotelean tradition of university philosophy and science was not, as commonly assumed, a static, monolithic barrier to scientific change. A case can be made for insisting that Galileo, Bacon, Harvey ...

Old Flames

Peter Parsons, 10 January 1983

The Latin Sexual Vocabulary 
by J.N. Adams.
Duckworth, 272 pp., £24, September 1982, 9780715616482
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Ovid: The Erotic Poems 
translated by Peter Green.
Penguin, 450 pp., £2.95, November 1982, 0 14 044360 6
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Women’s Life in Greece and Rome 
by Mary Lefkowitz and Maureen Fant.
Duckworth, 294 pp., £24, September 1982, 0 7156 1434 7
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Heroines and Hysterics 
by Mary Lefkowitz.
Duckworth, 96 pp., £8.95, September 1982, 0 7156 1518 1
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... 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 – Sappho the poetess, Philaenis the grande cocotte, Cornelia mother of the ...

Brother-Making

James Davidson, 8 February 1996

The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe 
by John Boswell.
Fontana, 412 pp., £8.99, January 1996, 0 00 686326 4
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... enough, but of male mothers, too, producing some intractable images for historians of sexuality. Aristotle, for instance, relates the story of the tyrant Periander of Ambracia, who asked his boyfriend if he was pregnant yet and was assassinated for his insolence. Visitors to Holborn’s 17th-century molly-houses would have found not only men in drag but ...

Eels Tomorrow, but Sprats Today

Peter Parsons, 18 September 1997

Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens 
by James Davidson.
HarperCollins, 372 pp., £25, June 1997, 0 00 255591 3
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... for the head), and nearly died of dyspepsia; the anonymous alcoholic immortalised by Aristotle, who put eggs under his mat and sat on them and drank continuously until they hatched. Not many readers nowadays will need the reminder that the Greeks were not all mind and marble. Davidson, however, presents them as a superior class of ...

Hopeless Warriors

Michael Gorra: Sherman Alexie’s novels, 5 March 1998

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven 
by Sherman Alexie.
Vintage, 223 pp., £6.99, September 1997, 9780749386696
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Reservation Blues 
by Sherman Alexie.
Minerva, 306 pp., £6.99, September 1996, 0 7493 9513 3
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Indian Killer 
by Sherman Alexie.
Secker, 420 pp., £9.99, September 1997, 0 436 20433 9
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... of mistake about Indians that Wilson does. An ex-cop whose Indian detective-hero is called ‘Aristotle Little Hawk’, Wilson can’t quite understand that ‘white people who pretend to be Indians are gently teased, ignored, plainly ridiculed, or beaten, depending on their degree of whiteness.’ I’m not certain just what ‘degree of ...

Good to Think With

Helen Pfeifer, 4 June 2020

Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought 1450-1750 
by Noel Malcolm.
Oxford, 512 pp., £25, May 2019, 978 0 19 883013 9
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... This idea, which enjoyed a long and successful career into the 20th century, drew on Aristotle’s division of governments into monarchy, despotism and tyranny. In his view, despotism was an intermediate category: like monarchy, it was hereditary and governed according to law, but, like tyranny, it was autocratic, and organised mainly to benefit ...

Antigone on Your Knee

Terry Eagleton, 6 February 2020

A Cultural History of Tragedy: Vols I-VI 
edited by Rebecca Bushnell.
Bloomsbury Academic, 1302 pp., £395, November 2019, 978 1 4742 8814 9
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... an intolerably tight spot is a plausible candidate. But he or she can’t be a villain, since, as Aristotle points out, we don’t grieve over scoundrels. In the traditional view, tragic events must not be reparable. Lear’s problems could not be solved by parking him in an old people’s home, and marriage counselling would do nothing for Anna ...

More Husband than Female

Sharon Marcus: Gender Renegades, 17 June 2021

Female Husbands: A Trans History 
by Jen Manion.
Cambridge, 350 pp., £17.99, March 2020, 978 1 108 48380 3
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Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from 19th-Century France 
by Rachel Mesch.
Stanford, 344 pp., £24.99, May 2020, 978 1 5036 0673 9
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... is not the sex they are assigned at birth but the life they live.’ In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argued for a form of knowledge he called practical: one learns to become a swimmer by swimming. One might say that a person becomes a man by living as a man. Mesch proposes that gender isn’t a label so much as a story, although judging by these ...

Mend and Extend

Jonathan Rée: Ernst Cassirer’s Curiosity, 18 November 2021

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 
by Ernst Cassirer, translated by Steve G. Lofts.
Routledge, 1412 pp., £150, September 2020, 978 1 138 90725 6
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... with a glorious inheritance: the tradition in which the pristine wisdom of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle had been tested and elaborated from one generation to the next, through Aquinas, Ficino and Descartes, down to Kant, Hegel, Frege, Husserl, Russell and Heidegger. He saw the history of philosophy, like the history of science, as a series of intellectual ...

Miracles, Marvels, Magic

Caroline Walker Bynum: Medieval Marvels, 9 July 2009

The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages 
by Robert Bartlett.
Cambridge, 170 pp., £17.99, April 2008, 978 0 521 70255 3
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... and the adoption of a new educational syllabus that privileged the naturalism and empiricism of Aristotle. In the second chapter, Bartlett explores the medieval understanding of the physical world, especially the investigation of eclipses and the elucidation of the relation of land to water through theories of the elements. The third chapter deals with ...

Pacesetter

Adrienne Mayor: Carthage, 24 June 2010

Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Mediterranean Civilisation 
by Richard Miles.
Allen Lane, 520 pp., £30, March 2010, 978 0 7139 9793 4
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... to illuminate – and complicate – the Greco-Roman literary evidence. With the exception of Aristotle, who singled out Carthage for admiration in the Politics (‘Many of the Carthaginian institutions are excellent. The superiority of their constitution is proved by the fact that the common people remain loyal to it’), most Greek and Latin writers ...

One Kidnapping Away

Tim Whitmarsh: ‘How to Manage Your Slaves’, 3 December 2015

How to Manage Your Slaves 
by Marcus Sidonius Falx, with Jerry Toner.
Profile, 224 pp., £8.99, May 2015, 978 1 78125 251 2
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... no more than that, in this book. When Greek philosophy is alluded to, the primary reference is to Aristotle, whose view that certain kinds of people are naturally inferior and designed for servitude was, it could be argued, already extreme and heterodox in the fourth century BCE. Toner doesn’t discuss the way literature and popular culture treated the lot ...

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