“... ancient parentage. Karl Popper points out in The Open Society that it won’t do to pretend that Plato was merely talking about ‘a bold invention’ – to quote Francis Cornford’s formulation – or a ‘necessary myth’, as it is also sometimes translated. The word Plato uses is pseude, ‘lie’, not ...”

“... only more obscure than its modern version, this is probably a reference to a passage of Plato, which argues the reverse – an academic allusion about as far from ‘folk wisdom’ as you could get.) But part of the contemporary appeal also lies in the feeling that the Meditations offer us a rare glimpse into the personal dilemmas of the man in ...”

“... doesn’t it come from the Greek hustera (womb/uterus), echoing the theories of Plato and Hippocrates on the erratic wanderings of the womb in women deprived of sexual intercourse? And yet it’s Huston who has it right: Charcot explicitly rejected the ‘uterine’ theory of hysteria, and for this reason recognised the existence of hysteria ...”

“... of Tarentum, who served his city as a general and whose work was an important influence on Plato. And then there was Archimedes. Archimedes was not among the first generation of Greek mathematicians, but became the most celebrated in antiquity. Tradition had him as a relative of the royal house of Syracuse, but all the stories about his life cast him ...”

“... a ‘cogently worked through universe of thought’ that puts its author on a level with Homer, Plato, Dante and Shakespeare. Turner sees a theological meaning in its incompleteness. Like the world in Thomas’s understanding of it, this finest of all works of theology is shot through with silence. Turner makes much of what one might call the anonymity of ...”

“... poet. Solon in old age, on hearing one of her songs, wanted to get it by heart before he died. To Plato Sappho was the Tenth Muse. Romanticism has seldom had a more difficult case to handle. She is credited with nine books, mostly sorted into different lyric metres: the first book alone, consisting entirely of poems written in the Sapphic stanza, totalled ...”

“... in a set of keen young readers and writers, girls and boys – they shared around Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Hugo, Proust and Yeats as well as Michael Arlen, Clemence Dane, P.G. Wodehouse and G.K. Chesterton. Johnson kept lists of all the books she read (90 in 1931, although she was working full time), with ...”

“... the French philosopher Henri Bergson was a worldwide celebrity, ranked as a thinker alongside Plato, Socrates, Descartes and Kant. William James thought Bergson’s work had wrought a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Lord Balfour read him with great care and attention; Teddy Roosevelt went so far as to write an article on his work. People climbed ...”

“... moral action, punishment, religion, liberalism, fascism, communism, education, war, sex, Plato, Marx, Freud. Some of these essays are dated, others slight, but there is plenty of interest here for readers other than the dedicated Collingwoodian. I found ‘Economics as a Philosophical Science’ and ‘Punishment and Forgiveness’ especially fresh ...”

“... verbal abuse, Glesca style’ around the dining table, from philosophical disputes (‘This bloke Plato – a right flannel merchant, eh?’), to the hilariously unequal encounter between a bubble-car and a man swathed in mummy bandages, Torrington translates Glasgow into ‘Laughsville’. His language is a constant delight: a stream of doggerel, quips and ...”

“... and heliocentric models of the planetary system were known to be equivalent from the time of Plato. Thus the technical side of Copernicus’s reform caused no consternation. It was quite another matter, however, if the heliocentric model were taken to reflect the actual structure of the planetary system, as Copernicus believed. To counteract objections ...”

“... if it is suggested that a prophet may speak more truly than he knows, the floodgates open, and Plato, Virgil and the author of the Prometheus Vinctus may be held to have foretold the coming of Christ.) This persistent misinterpretation of Scripture has undoubtedly affected the Gospels’ presentation of events; on occasion indeed (as with the Nativity at ...”

“... and pursuing aims and goals of our own. The contemplative picture of knowledge that dates back to Plato is an entirely misleading one, for a being without aims whose only life consisted in contemplation would not have a language to enable it to describe the world in the first place. And a creature all of whose beliefs turned out, per impossible, to be ...”

“... diagonals at which rooflines recede from view, but they had no conceptual back-up from theorists. Plato, Euclid and Ptolemy were fixated on the active, probing aspects of vision: the way we peer out and construe the world before us. Their formulation, which now seems at once kooky and clunky, described eyesight as ‘extramission’ – a kind of radar. The ...”

“... and excited essay by Gerard Casey about how T.F. made him read Jacob Boehme, whom he preferred to Plato – ‘that flighty one: honest Jacob has the hammer that rings my bell.’ Gerard Casey is a Dorset resident of Welsh upbringing: he farmed in Kenya with T.F.’s brother, Willie, and married the daughter of their sister Lucy. He writes about religion in ...”