Search Results

“... 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 ...”

“... end up subverting their own claims, critique shows up their unity (a sacred critical doctrine from Aristotle to Northrop Frye) as something of a sham. It also has an interest in demonstrating how a poem or novel, whatever it may think it’s up to, is unwittingly complicit with political power. What, however, if critique itself were plagued by ...”

“... for that. In literary criticism, the dogma that a work of art must constitute a unity runs from Aristotle to the present day, excluding all manner of vitalising conflicts and contradictions. In aesthetics as in politics, unity is something of a fetish. One reason we want to regard our life histories as all of a piece is a fear of loss and damage. To be ...”

“... secular debates over dominion and stewardship, which began early and continue to this day. From Aristotle and the Bible, and on to Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes and others, the point was made that rational human beings, the creatures with immortal souls, were the pinnacle of creation. But if animals were always and everywhere inferior, the dilemma persisted ...”

“... as a distinctive tradition has shaped American political culture and institutions, it derived from Aristotle, Livy and Polybius, not Locke.These insights have failed to dislodge Locke from his place in American popular memory, however misremembered or historically dubious. But a growing awareness on the progressive left of his shareholding in the Royal African ...”

“... pushes back against the idea, present in ancient philosophical thought since at least the time of Aristotle, that some human beings are naturally slavish. The enslaved are the enslaver’s kinsmen, Epictetus says, and they, too, are the offspring of Zeus; their subjugation is not justified by their supposed inferiority. The only real ‘slaves’ are those ...”