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Muffled Barks, Muted Yelps

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Hurricane Season’, 19 March 2020

Hurricane Season 
by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes.
Fitzcarraldo, 232 pp., £12.99, February, 978 1 913097 09 7
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... 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 ...

Greek Hearts and Diadems

James Romm: Antigonid Rule, 18 November 2021

The Making of a King: Antigonus Gonatas of Macedon and the Greeks 
by Robin Waterfield.
Oxford, 277 pp., £21.99, September 2021, 978 0 19 885301 5
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... 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 ...

Damnable Deficient

Colin Kidd: The American Revolution, 17 November 2005

1776: America and Britain at War 
by David McCullough.
Allen Lane, 386 pp., £25, June 2005, 0 7139 9863 6
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... 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 ...

Proverbs

William Ian Miller: Jon Elster, 10 August 2000

Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions 
by Jon Elster.
Cambridge, 450 pp., £14.95, March 1999, 0 521 64487 9
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... 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 ...

What killed the Neanderthals?

Luke Mitchell, 8 May 2014

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History 
by Elizabeth Kolbert.
Bloomsbury, 336 pp., £12.99, February 2014, 978 1 4088 5122 7
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... 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 ...

Let’s Cut to the Wail

Michael Wood: The Oresteia according to Anne Carson, 11 June 2009

An Oresteia 
translated by Anne Carson.
Faber, 255 pp., $27, March 2009, 978 0 86547 902 9
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... 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 ...

On Not Getting the Credit

Brian Dillon: Eileen Gray, 23 May 2013

Eileen Gray 
Pompidou Centre, 20 February 2013 to 20 May 2013Show More
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... 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 ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: Happiness, 23 September 2010

... 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 ...

Pirouette on a Sixpence

Christopher Prendergast: Untranslatables, 10 September 2015

Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon 
edited by Barbara Cassin, translated by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood.
Princeton, 1297 pp., £44.95, February 2014, 978 0 691 13870 1
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... 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 ...

Europe, what Europe?

Colin Kidd: J.G.A. Pocock, 6 November 2008

The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 344 pp., £18.99, September 2005, 9780521616454
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Barbarism and Religion. Vol. III: The First Decline and Fall 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 527 pp., £19.99, October 2005, 0 521 67233 3
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Barbarism and Religion. Vol. IV: Barbarians, Savages and Empires 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £17.99, February 2008, 978 0 521 72101 1
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... 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 ...

All Curls and Pearls

Lorraine Daston: Why are we so curious?, 23 June 2005

The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany 
by Neil Kenny.
Oxford, 484 pp., £68, July 2004, 0 19 927136 4
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... 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 ...

Dive In!

Bruce Robbins: Hegelian reflections, 2 November 2000

Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in 20th-Century France 
by Judith Butler.
Columbia, 268 pp., £12, June 1999, 0 231 06451 9
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... whose lives are distant from our own’. Hence ‘we can say of the mainstream realist novel what Aristotle said of tragic drama: that the very form constructs compassion in readers, positioning them as people who care intensely about the sufferings and bad luck of others, and who identify with them in ways that show possibilities for ...

Pink Elephants

Alex Oliver, 2 November 2000

Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism 
by Robert Brandom.
Harvard, 230 pp., £21.95, June 2000, 0 674 00158 3
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... aphoristic gem is neutered by the surrounding prose, like Château Margaux on the rocks. Aristotle was spot on when, in his Rhetoric, he warned against such ‘frigidities’. I suspect Brandom thinks that his philosophical problems and solutions don’t yield to ordinary expression but demand a whole new vocabulary. I have never believed this ...

Part of the Fun of being an English Protestant

Patrick Collinson: Recovering the Reformation, 22 July 2004

Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700 
by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £25, September 2003, 0 7139 9370 7
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... Transubstantiation? ‘Thousands of Protestants were burned at the stake for denying an idea of Aristotle, who had never heard of Jesus Christ.’ Spain ‘destroyed the only non-Christian societies left in Western Europe’. ‘It is possible to talk of an Iberian Reformation before the Reformation.’ Erasmus? He ‘constructed a salon of the ...

Was it really a translation?

T.P. Wiseman: Latin Literature, 22 September 2016

Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature 
by Denis Feeney.
Harvard, 382 pp., £25, January 2016, 978 0 674 05523 0
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... 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 ...

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