“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not for household use? Did the practice change over time? Pomeroy suggests that Xenophon and Plato ‘exaggerate the Spartans’ liberation from weaving’ in order to make Sparta seem more opposed to the norms of Greek life. As for the mirror handles, Homer called Sparta the ‘land of beautiful women’, famous for their height and their healthy good ...”

“... this “distinguished 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 ...”

“... debtors, shady lenders, and the ethical dubiousness of charging interest. In the Republic, Plato insisted that interest-bearing loans put the polis at risk of revolt by the immiserated poor.The danger posed by interest necessitated controls, the most enduring of which was in Deuteronomy 23, which forbade the Israelite from charging interest to his ...”

“... have – practical ethics rather than spiritual hoarding. Casey is not especially drawn to the Plato who would so influence Christianity, the Plato who goes against the Greek idea of the afterlife as a shadowy and half-real place; nor does he much care for Pericles’ rather chilly ideal of civic devotion as eternal ...”

“... Cyrenaics, Platonists, Epicureans and Stoics are all thought to have had female participants. Plato admitted at least two women into his academy, Lasthenia of Mantinea and Axiothea of Phlius (Axiothea is said by Diogenes to have worn men’s clothes); his Symposium is our only source for the philosopher and priestess Diotima, who, with Aspasia, is one of ...”

“... first story is about the shift, between Greek times and now, towards emphasising the inner life. Plato’s picture of the soul ruling the body does not make much of the inwardness of the soul. The modern stress on individuality is linked to awareness of our complex inner life. Taylor gives a subtle and complex account of how this awareness has a history, and ...”

“... thinkers, ‘the cave of the ordinary’ (Cavell’s phrase) harbours within (and not without, as Plato and other metaphysicians have insisted) a transcendental prospect: the astonishing recognition, available to anyone, that the everyday life one routinely experiences in a mood of quiet desperation (Thoreau), or of silent melancholy (Emerson), or of bedimmed ...”

“... is most at risk is us. The eugenic ideal, which has been around in Western cultures at least since Plato, continues to tantalise some. Indeed, in the Sixties, when the genetic code of DNA was worked out, biologists here and there began calling for a new but sanitised eugenics, for human biological engineering free from racial and class bias and devoted to ...”

“... but also in poems like ‘Agoraphobia’ and ‘Snake’. The quotation from Plato at the beginning of the book seems apposite: ‘And if the soul, too, my dear Alcibiades, is to know itself, it must surely look into a soul.’ If Swimming in the Flood is Burnside’s best book, The Dumb House is his worst. His desire to steer away from ...”