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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 ...

If the hare sees the sea

Anna Della Subin: Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri, 30 November 2017

The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition 
by Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri, translated by Elias Muhanna.
Penguin, 352 pp., £11.99, October 2016, 978 0 14 310748 4
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... 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 ...

In Her Philosopher’s Cloak

Barbara Graziosi: Hypatia, 17 August 2017

Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher 
by Edward J. Watts.
Oxford, 205 pp., £19.99, April 2017, 978 0 19 021003 8
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... cloak, walk in the streets right through the middle of town, and publicly interpret Plato, Aristotle, or the works of any other philosopher to those who wanted to listen to her. In addition to her expertise in teaching she rose to the pinnacle of civic virtue. She was both just and chaste and remained always a virgin; however, because she was ...

Empires in Disguise

Tom Stevenson, 4 May 2023

Superstates: Empires of the 21st Century 
by Alasdair Roberts.
Polity, 235 pp., £17.99, December 2022, 978 1 5095 4448 6
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... of just 5040: ‘numbers enough for war and peace, and for all contracts and dealings’. Aristotle believed large states to be ‘almost incapable of constitutional government’, and that large populations carried the risk of foreigners blending in and acquiring the rights of citizens. The biggest states tend to have what George Kennan once called ...

Does marmalade exist?

Terry Eagleton, 27 January 2022

The Concept of the Social: Scepticism, Idleness and Utopia 
by Malcolm Bull.
Verso, 243 pp., £16.99, October 2021, 978 1 84467 293 6
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... 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 ...

Old Literature and its Enemies

Claude Rawson, 25 April 1991

The Death of Literature 
by Alvin Kernan.
Yale, 230 pp., £18.95, October 1990, 0 300 04783 5
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Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy and Tradition 
by Alasdair MacIntyre.
Duckworth, 241 pp., £12.95, August 1990, 0 7156 2337 0
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Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man 
by David Lehman.
Poseidon, 318 pp., $21.95, February 1991, 0 671 68239 3
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... On the Monday, he commenced his lecture by quoting Montaigne, who was himself citing Aristotle: ‘O my friends, there is no friend.’ The two parts of the sentence are incompatible, Derrida observed. If there is no friend, to whom am I speaking? Or, with a shift in the formal emphasis: if I can address you as my friends, how can I say there is ...

Non-Identity Crisis

Stephen Mulhall: Parfit’s Trolley Problem, 1 June 2023

Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality 
by David Edmonds.
Princeton, 380 pp., £28, April, 978 0 691 22523 4
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... of it, wildly implausible. It is no accident that students are introduced to the approaches of Aristotle, Kant and Mill as being mutually opposed: the first centres morality on the goal of living a virtuous life, the second on fulfilling one’s obligations, and the third on maximising beneficial consequences. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Parfit ...

Taking it up again

Margaret Anne Doody, 21 March 1991

Henry James and Revision 
by Philip Horne.
Oxford, 373 pp., £40, December 1990, 0 19 812871 1
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... form of censorship. Publishers sometimes encourage revision for other reasons. When I published Aristotle Detective, I discovered that publishers prefer some substantial and not merely accidental difference between American and English editions. I was urged to make a real change from the English text for the American version, which I happily ...

Gentle Boyle

Keith Thomas, 22 September 1994

A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in 17th-Century England 
by Steven Shapin.
Chicago, 483 pp., £23.95, June 1994, 0 226 75018 3
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... Nothing, they said, should be taken on trust, for it was misplaced deference to the authority of Aristotle, Galen and the other philosophers of Antiquity which had led to centuries of error. Instead, the new experimental philosophers should rely only on their own reason and experience. Sir Thomas Browne declared that ‘a powerfull enemy unto ...

Pull the Other One

Ian Hacking, 26 January 1995

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life 
by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray.
Free Press, 845 pp., £25, November 1994, 0 02 914673 9
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... and I could expatiate on it for pages. But a sense of reality intrudes; just as it intruded when Aristotle thought about Plato. I have to confess that I much enjoyed parts of this book – the reams of information, the simplistic data analysis, the glorious caricature of the End of America as We Have Known It. I found the last chapter especially ...

Do not disturb

Bernard Williams, 20 October 1994

The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Princeton, 558 pp., £22.50, June 1994, 0 691 03342 0
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... Hellenistic philosophy is often called ‘post-Aristotelian’ philosophy, and Nussbaum takes Aristotle (who died a year after Alexander) as the starting-point, setting out his ethical outlook as a kind of bench-mark. She claims for him, as she has in many other writings, a rather more open-minded and exploratory humanism than some people find in him; and ...

What mattered to Erasmus

James McConica, 2 March 1989

Erasmus’s Annotations on the New Testament. The Gospels: Facsimile of the final Latin text with all earlier variants 
edited by Anne Reeve.
Duckworth, 284 pp., £35, March 1986, 9780715619902
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Erasmus’s Annotations on the New Testament: From Philologist to Theologian 
by Erika Rummel.
Toronto, 234 pp., £24.50, January 1987, 0 8020 5683 0
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A New Rabelais Bibliography: Editions of Rabelais before 1626 
by Stephen Rawles and M.A. Screech.
Droz, 691 pp.
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The Library of Robert Burton 
by Nicholas Kiessling.
Oxford Bibliographic Society, 433 pp., £25, May 1988, 0 901420 42 5
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... search for a new principle in the organisation of knowledge. One result was the long Nachleben of Aristotle, another was the search for a wholly new method associated with the name of Pierre de la Ramée. The advent of the vernacular and the crisis in method together ensured the death of the neo-Latin world of Erasmus, ushering in that of Bacon and ...