“... Schadewaldt’s Iliasstudien showed no interest in oral poetry: but he had taken a hint from Aristotle who observed in the Poetics that Homer’s work had an artistic shape, with deliberate limits and sections, as his successors’ (lost to us) did not. With a mass of detailed arguments Schadewaldt rebutted many of the analysts’ chief points and shed a ...”

“... thesis that fictional characters are ‘person-kinds’ – a theory for which Wolterstorff claims Aristotle as an ancestor. We have a pervasive habit in our ordinary speech of talking of fictional characters as if they were real people. Isn’t Sherlock Holmes the most famous detective that most of us have heard of? But it takes a logician to sort out the ...”

“... to characterise his work, offers to defend a new kind of moral naturalism that reaches back to Aristotle. His point seems to be that since the rise of science in the 17th century we have become steeped in a view of the natural world as comprising only the kinds of facts mentioned by the physical sciences, but that the Greeks would have found a place for a ...”

“... hateful. One ancient way of demonising money was to accuse it of breeding like a sentient being. Aristotle in the Politics noted this indecency, the birth of money from money. His word for ‘interest’ is tokos, which means ‘offspring’ – money out at interest offers a demonic parody of natural reproduction. A couple of millennia later Shakespeare is ...”

“... can’t and shouldn’t become an ‘ineluctable modality’ (a phrase in Ulysses derived from Aristotle), something impossible to keep out, like the visual impressions received by an open-sighted eye. In literature readerly freedom is not something for technique to overcome but the medium through which technique operates, however extreme the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and John Adams as the American equivalents of Plato, Aristotle, Cato and Brutus, while the wider culture acknowledges the near-superhuman qualities of the men of 1776. The founders in their periwigs, breeches and frockcoats hold a secure place in the popular iconography of American freedom, alongside comic-book ...”

“... than with envy, shame, hope, relief and pity, but can anyone deny his larger claim? He credits Aristotle, with considerable justice, with the most perspicacious philosophic discussion of the emotions. My own nominee for that role would be Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, which Elster surprisingly ignores. But he makes his case forcefully by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the house came to auction in 1960 he arranged for his friend Marie-Louise Schelbert to buy it (Aristotle Onassis was one of the bidders). He died while swimming in sight of it, in August 1965. At least he kept Schelbert from making a bonfire of the furniture, but Gray got none of it back. Schelbert died in 1982, leaving the house to her doctor, Peter ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... late 17th century, it had become painfully evident to savants that the best minds of Antiquity – Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen – had erred. They tried to immunise themselves against further intellectual debacles by proceeding slowly and methodically, gathering up fragments of fact in preparation for a grand synthesis postponed to some remote future date. Kenny ...”