“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of political thought. Students were once introduced to it by way of its giants – the likes of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Marx. Rather than a living discussion among contemporaries, between great thinkers and lesser fry, political thought was reckoned to be a more elevated – if stilted – affair, of giant responding unto ...”

“... romance or even Hollywood screwball comedy. And in one sense we have. Carson reminds us that Aristotle thought that Euripides, ‘whatever the ineptitudes of his stagecraft’, was ‘the most tragic’ of the tragic poets. Here, I think, is where her idea that there is ‘something terrible in randomness’ is trumped by the dramatist himself. There is ...”

“... but I can tag along if I want). She has read, or rather ‘plunged into’ everything: Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, Montaigne, Pascal, Bertrand Russell, Thoreau, Schopenhauer and Oprah; Tolstoy, Woolf and McEwan; Adam Smith, the Dalai Lama and Malcolm Gladwell. Everything. And having emerged dripping with all that wisdom, she has at last managed to take ...”

“... because it hadn’t yet occurred to anyone that an entire species could cease to exist. ‘Aristotle wrote a ten-book History of Animals without ever considering the possibility that animals actually had a history,’ Kolbert writes, and in Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, published four years before Le Moyne’s discovery, ‘there is really only one ...”

“... or eidos, and one reason for that is Heidegger (in a sub-entry on Sein und Zeit). In the index, Aristotle has 153 mentions, Kant 133, Plato 105, Descartes and Hegel 70, Aquinas 53 and Hume 52. Heidegger ties with Plato at 105. These statistics, though crude, tell us something. It’s generally acknowledged that Heidegger is central to the whole relation of ...”

“... Rome, a Hellenic city situated somewhere on the shore of the Great Sea.’ His contemporary Aristotle, though much better informed about Rome, also thought of it as a Greek city, founded by Achaeans who had been blown off course on their way back from the Trojan War. According to Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor ...”

“... He extols the prophets and sages ‘who came from Egypt’, among them Jesus, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Empedocles and Alexander the Great. ‘In Egypt many of the sciences were born that made the world civilised and prosperous, such as Greek medicine,’ he writes. He folds the great Greek philosophers into Egypt’s own intellectual ...”

“... valuable assets, as the Macedonian kings had long understood. In previous centuries, Euripides, Aristotle and other luminaries had accepted invitations to join the royal court in Pella, the capital of Macedon. Antigonus tried to attract Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoics, but, according to a letter that may or may not be genuine, he felt too frail to ...”

“... Equity means adjusting the principles of justice to fit the peculiar facts of a case, and this, Aristotle believes, inclines the law to lenience. Since the law will incorporate this act as a precedent, it will become more and more merciful as it evolves, until in Bull’s view the distinction between justice and mercy will be abolished and the latter will ...”

“... 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 ...”