Search Results

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was not, however, the only available position: medieval philosophers and theologians influenced by Aristotle sought for the most part to reduce the scope of wonder. The task of the wise man, in the words of a 13th-century text mistakenly attributed to Albertus Magnus, was ‘to make wonders cease’. For them, too great a readiness to marvel at things was the ...”

“... Theory of Truth, in a tradition which goes back through Avicenna and Isaac Israeli to Aristotle. That Israeli was a Jew hardly makes the theory Jewish. Nor is the theory itself something that Heidegger repudiates: he simply (!) wants to see in what such a formulation is grounded, going on to show that truth refers to a certain mode of ...”

“... in our sensory receptors’, whereas logical thinking goes back to ancient Greece: ‘it was Aristotle who taught us how to think.’ Questions of logic, meaning or knowledge may, however, need to be handled with rather more interpretative tact than this: they do not lend themselves to the construction of such definite periodisations and lines of ...”

“... seem more regal was to patronise scholars, just as Alexander had patronised his teacher, Aristotle. Alexandria, the new capital of Egypt, had the greatest concentration of scholars, including the mathematicians Euclid, Eratosthenes, Conon, Apollonius and Diocles, with several of whom Archimedes corresponded. It’s quite possible that he himself ...”