“... would have recognised it immediately as a work of moral philosophy, in a tradition stretching from Aristotle to Cicero and beyond. Most modern editions drop the full title, as they abandon its humanistic apparatus of dedicatory epistles and pointed marginalia. This may give the book a kind of accessibility but it obscures the work’s origins in a movement ...”

“... also see that these arguments were being supported by gross errors of fact, such as the idea that Aristotle had plundered the Egyptian library at Alexandria as a basis for his own writings, whereas the library had actually been founded by Macedonian Greeks at least thirty years after Aristotle’s death. One might wonder ...”

“... 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 madhouse ever denied such evident truths? Well, according to Schwartz, the attack has been sustained by ...”

“... showed himself to be more profoundly indebted to the tradition of classicist criticism ‘from Aristotle to La Harpe’. His critical approach could be seen, against this perspective, as the raising of precisely those questions which the classicists, imprisoned within the ideology of mimesis, were incapable of framing: questions which had nevertheless ...”

“... living in the USA, Kurt Gödel. Gödel has been plausibly described as the greatest logician since Aristotle, because his incompleteness proof, formal and final, showed that any mathematical system of an interesting complexity must generate propositions which cannot be shown within the system to be true or shown to be false. The proof blocked the programme of ...”

“... subject to leave to the social scientists.’ Well – OK, fellas. Vance Packard sells better than Aristotle, and we don’t want to take ourselves too seriously. But for all the wisecracking, Fussell is right to quote also, as he does, John Adams in 1805: ‘The rewards ... in this life are esteem and admiration of others – the punishments are neglect and ...”

“... difficult and precious fragments of Heraclitus, and was the author of the suggestion that when Aristotle in his Poetics speaks of tragedy as effecting a katharsis – a cleansing or purification – of the emotions, he is employing a metaphor from medicine: in this connection, it is interesting to note that his niece Martha became the wife of Sigmund ...”

“... of the erotic genre over the philosophical is celebrated by a striking image on the cover: Aristotle, on all fours, ridden by the hetaera Phyllis brandishing a whip. Considered morally dubious in the last century and literarily deficient in our own, the Erotikoi Logoi have not until recently received the attention due to the first European novels. They ...”

“... modernist, unity is a discredited notion. It is striking how original a move this is. From Aristotle to I.A. Richards, the work of art is expected to form a coherent whole. It is not until the rise of Futurism, Constructivism, Surrealism and so on that this arbitrary diktat is really challenged. From the Dadaists to Brecht, there is an urge to ...”

“... 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 categories. The prediction of ...”

“... fantasies follow a predictable pattern. Each chapter begins with some combination of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero or Augustine. As we might expect from a medieval historian, she then looks at texts from early Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before concluding ...”

“... immediately clear. As a systematic attempt to parse and present all extant knowledge of birds from Aristotle onwards, and to integrate those elements that could withstand modern scrutiny with original observations and research, the Ornithology set a new standard for works on the natural world. Willughby and Ray were both members of the Royal Society; they ...”

“... and, finally, culture. In The Ape and the Sushi Master, de Waal points out that Darwin, like Aristotle and Aristotle’s contemporary, the Chinese sage Mencius, thought kindness and co-operation must be based on natural instincts. It was Huxley, he writes, who distorted Darwinism into ‘nature red in tooth and ...”

“... spirit’). The early machines bubbled oxygen through a reservoir of blood in the sort of churning Aristotle imagined took place in the ventricles. But since the mid-1970s we have suspected that it’s better to keep blood and air apart, separated by a synthetic, disposable membrane. Once it has passed through the oxygenator, the blood is squeezed through a ...”

“... intellect” would tell us about Christian charity and speak of Kant, Plato, Hegel, Aristotle, Jesus and Thomas Aquinas very enthusiastically, knowing that nine out of ten people in his audience had never heard of these philosophers.’ For Malik, culture was to be largely understood in terms of masterpieces produced (mostly) by dead white ...”