“... our intuitive expectations these days – and of the sensus communis, the concept, running from Aristotle to Descartes, of a central mental junction box. If the man cured of blindness had no option but to reach out and check the objects’ identity with his fingers: if concepts of form, and of all that more generally might depend on them, could only be ...”

“... of themselves that the objects have generated – copies termed ‘images’ or ‘simulacra’. Aristotle saw there were problems with this hypothesis, but for a long time it remained the default account of vision – probably because it answers to the intuition that if I see you, I have some sort of hold on you. It was only under the Fatimid caliphs of ...”

“... Longinus, whose On the Sublime is the most important work of ancient literary criticism between Aristotle and Augustine, served as tutor to the royal teenager. While the western empire, from Britain to the Balkans, remained threatened by invasion and was carved up among a series of competing emperors, Zenobia set about conquering the largest single kingdom ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is sufficient that the man should not be a liar’), and I think Cicero was only quoting Aristotle. At about the same time, Bossy reviewed Natalie Zemon Davis’s Fiction in the Archives, and somewhat mischievously. People in 16th-century France, he thought, were perfectly capable of distinguishing between fact and fiction: which was to brush aside ...”

“... so now in bringing his thoughts together in what he describes as his ‘philosophy of society’. Aristotle, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Habermas, Bourdieu and Foucault are all dismissed in a sentence here, Locke in a footnote. They all took it for granted that we are language-speaking animals, and were then ‘off and running with an account of society, social ...”

“... beer, returning to tipple throughout the day with no ill effects. (Unlike parrots, which as Aristotle knew, have no head for alcohol: in Australia, where they binge on over-ripe pears, birdwatchers have seen them getting legless, Amy Winehouse-style, faltering on branches and plummeting from trees.) For a long time no one in avian taxonomy knew where to ...”

“... bunch with links to Arab circles, and Frederick himself had a reputation for being fond of Aristotle and of the dissolute life. At the Council of Lyon in 1245, the papal representative called Frederick a ‘new Lucifer’. A book that exists only as a rumour can have as many authors as required, and the charge of being the originator or disseminator of ...”

“... species has essential, unalterable characteristics, which can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle. The mysteries were, first, over what it is about life that distinguishes it from death, and second, the process by which a fully developed organism, be it chicken or human, emerges from a fertilised egg. The first mystery was solved, tautologically, by ...”

“... to Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus as they wrestle with the form/matter opposition inherited from Aristotle and riddle out where to place Christ’s body in such a scheme. Whether or not the corpse is a nonperson, it resembles a human being, at least for a time, and must be disposed of before that resemblance collapses. This status as ‘semblant body’ is a ...”