“... 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 ...”

“... magisterial over creation. But the basic distinction remains.’ Only the inspired response of Aristotle to Euripides, Samuel Johnson to Shakespeare or Sainte-Beuve to Racine belong in Steiner’s republic. Does this mean that he sees Real Presences itself as a critical classic? Or is it yet another all-powerful act of impotence? The book certainly does ...”

“... or Kripke’s or Dummett’s? What of Leibniz and Spinoza and Kant and Hume and Plato and Aristotle? Is all this to be condemned as science fetishism? I rather fear he does mean this, at least in the sense that his words imply it. His positive recommendations, such as they are, leave no room for the activities of such thinkers. The problem is that ...”

“... of basic colours, which was determined by practicality and, in my view, chromatic athleticism. Aristotle was evidently convinced that certain rainbow colours could not be imitated or reached by mixture, and while this could have set a limit to what Apelles could do in one sense, it leaves the way open to use a number of stratagems to get viewers to believe ...”

“... Hobbes’s Aristotelian primer, A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique, is not so much a summary of Aristotle as a repudiation of Aristotle’s position in favour of Ramism. ‘How far Hobbes was aware of what he was doing here is problematical. Ramism and what it stood for – intellectual absolutism in terms of a ...”

“... In 1509, by poring over Augustine, Luther ‘discovered the contrast between the Church Father and Aristotle’ – a remarkable discovery for anyone to stand in need of. In 1512 Martin became Doctor Luther, and Staupitz handed over to him the chair of Biblical Theology he had been occupying at the new University of Wittenberg. The Ninety-Five Theses followed ...”

“... well with a roman à clef called The Greek which was transparently about the loves and feuds of Aristotle Onassis. But Rey could hide behind the defence that there was more than one rich, libidinous, Greek ship-owner with a taste for opera singers, and that any resemblance was coincidental: he was, of course, thinking about one of the others or all the ...”

“... further implications. Is Donagan right in thinking that the concept was accurately delineated by Aristotle, and that its presupposition, worked out by Aquinas, is that we possess the liberty of complete indifference? Certainly, human agents must always have thought of their actions as, in some sense, a new beginning. But did they think this in the audacious ...”

“... taught him about the nature and provenance of the classical conventions: we read with him from Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian. We follow the rise of the Christian Grand Style in Renaissance Europe, we ponder Francis Bacon’s thesis of the colours of good and evil, we trace the slow movement of the study of human memory from rhetoric to medical science ...”

“... Gulliver on a visit to the afterworld of Glubbdubdrib, one of the sights was that of Homer and Aristotle among their innumerable mob of commentators, both of them ‘perfect Strangers to the rest of the Company’. There are people one does not know, just as there are things beneath one’s notice. As Pope said in ‘An Essay on Criticism’, combining ...”

“... years ago, in Three Philosophers, Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach treated Frege alongside Aristotle and St Thomas, two philosophers whose usefulness has often been their magisterial quality and the ways it can be appropriated. There are good reasons for assigning this kind of role to Frege. He writes in a wonderfully clear, untentative way, which ...”