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“... sometimes strangely stumbling) attempts at analysis by such early masters of self-consciousness as Plato and Aristotle. What was a word? How could meaning reside in a sound? Why are some sequences of words better than others, and how many dimensions of comparison are there? Some utterances are false but beautiful, others are true but ugly or boring, and still ...”

“... Karim reads Tolstoy, and Fauzia, to Jerry’s amazement, has books by Dante, Shakespeare and Plato on her shelves (‘Are these yours? Do you understand them?’). Where a character’s non-Englishness is marked through conversational phrases in Kiswahili, Gurnah sticks with commonplace roman rather than exoticising italics. He’s relaxed about ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bar, chiefly, it seems, at the insistence of his father. His successful fellowship dissertation on Plato, however, determined the course of his life. Trinity was to be his home until his marriage in middle life; in a sense, it remained so always. The closest and most significant of his Cambridge friendships was with Robertson Smith, fellow Scot, outstanding ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... good at the other. So Veblen held, maybe naively, that society ought to be run by engineers; and Plato held, maybe even more naively, that it ought to be run by philosophers. Whereas, if you’re on the rationalist side of this debate, you won’t be surprised to find every sort of intellectual sophistication cohabiting with every sort of naivety, and will ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... been thought necessary to gloss references to Lenin, Alexander the Great, the Archangel Gabriel, Plato and Nirvana. It might be added that line-numbers (in fives) are given in the margins throughout the texts: an ugly and unnecessary mode of typographical embalming. As for the Revelation, the last book of the Christian scriptures, perhaps all that needs to ...”

“... role of the eminently ‘modern’ issue of egoism in the moral thought of both Socrates and Plato, to which MacIntyre hardly does justice. A third ground is the balance in his account between the consequences for morality of abandoning Aristotle and those of abandoning Christianity. Apart from the question of truth and falsity, there is no doubt more ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... What, intuitive reader, are the truth-conditions of ‘Aristotle was less religious than Plato’? Philosophers of language have to supply truth-conditions in such puzzle-cases; it is their job. But it is not clear that the man in the street is going to be of much help to either side in the controversy. Still, even if we have no intuitions about ...”

“... is a bird insofar as it flies and not a bird insofar as it is viviparous and suckles its young.’ Plato refers to the riddle about the eunuch and the bat to illustrate the way in which all perceptible things ‘dualise’ between being and not-being. Dualisers are popular in folklore. In Homer, the souls of the dead twitter like bats in a cave. Aesop’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”