“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... up with an audience of just three students. He regarded the work of most philosophers except for Plato, Kant and himself as a lot of hot air. He was venomous, arrogant and cantankerous, and professed to believe that Germans needed long words in order to give their minds more time to think. He was also a ferocious misogynist even by the relaxed standards of ...”

“... Ibn Rushd), the universe is eternal. It has always existed and will always exist. For Plato, the universe is not eternal, but was created at a fixed point in time. As God made it out of something, however, there must have been pre-existing matter, like wood waiting to be turned into tables and chairs. Then there was the position adopted by most ...”

“... as synonyms for hundreds of years in Greco-Roman culture. In Athens in the fourth century Bce, Plato spoke only of astronomia, Aristotle of astrologia; both were referring to the movements of the heavens (what we would call astronomy). In the middle of the second century CE, Ptolemy did make the distinction, separating prognostication by the stars into two ...”

“... Galileo’s Dialogo, the most powerful philosophic-dramatic dialogues written in the West after Plato. Though a full translation into English is at last in progress, the flavour of the original will be difficult to capture. De Maistre’s handling of the pulse and cadence of argument, of exposition, of challenge, of momentary mundane détente, has a ...”

“... illusions as we are, which is part of the reason the senses come under philosophical suspicion in Plato. Ancient sculptors enlarged the heads of figures meant to be placed on high columns, in order that they should look normal seen from the ground; ancient architects induced a subtle curvature into a line of columns so that it would look straight. Kant’s ...”

“... world. These are anti-war (‘i sing of Olaf glad and big’, ‘my sweet old etcetera’, ‘plato told / him’), anti-commerce (‘a salesman is an it that stinks Excuse’), anti-bourgeois (‘the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls’), anti-left (‘kumrads die because they’re told’), even anti-American (‘next to of course god america ...”

“... the order of the day. MacDiarmid as an impenitent Leninist will have none of that:   Homer, Plato, Plotinus, Catullus, Horace, and scores of others of whom ‘the ordinary people’ know nothing are nevertheless immortal.   ‘The ordinary people’ do learn a little about some of the great figures in literature during their school years, but they ...”

“... unfashionable views are – in plain English – these: that the beliefs held by such people as Plato and Confucius had some effect on their actions, and that the theories and arguments of such people as Aristotle and Mo-tzu should be construed as serious attempts to discover the truth. Are these views really unfashionable? Or rather, has anyone outside the ...”

“... to derive from the ode (or, come to that, from the whole of Sophocles and the whole of Hölderlin) Plato’s theory of Forms or Aristotle’s doctrine of substance? Or take these words, a quotation from Heidegger which Steiner appears to endorse: ‘polis is usually translated as city or city-state. This does not capture the full meaning. Polis ...”

“... elegance. ‘Boeotian swine’ was a common insult in cosmopolitan Athens. Both Aristophanes and Plato lampooned the rustic Boeotian dialect, with its broad, flat ‘ah’ sounds in place of the Attic ‘ee’. (Theban names often end in -das, Epaminondas, rather than the more familiar Athenian -des.) But the greatest ignominy for Thebes was its decision in ...”