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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of magic called catoptromancy made use of them to find lost objects. But mirrors were dangerous: Aristotle said that menstruating women who gazed at them soiled them, and it was argued that ‘any person who looks at himself in the mirror of a whore will resemble her in impudence and bawdiness.’ To this day, people cover mirrors after a death, which was ...”

“... hand. She tried unsuccessfully to run an English salon and to preserve sanity by keeping Plato and Aristotle at her bedside; but that did not stop her dancing with the equivalent of toy boys in the ominously named Patent Leather Room. Meeting Chaplin, she said he did not look as funny as she had expected, and he replied: ‘Neither do you.’ The on-off affair ...”

“... an alternative, secret tradition of revealed knowledge. Faustus’s discarding of authorities – Aristotle, Galen, Justinian and St Jerome are named in the opening soliloquy – is in the iconoclastic spirit of Paracelsus, who cast the medical Canon of Avicenna onto the St John’s Day bonfire in Basle, and of Cornelius Agrippa in his sweeping ...”

“... and lavish traffic in paint. In passages of certain paintings – the chain of honour in the Aristotle or the helmet in the Man with the Golden Helmet – the two are made one.’ Hoarding has surely never been associated with ‘traffic in money’, which must involve spending. Also, ‘loving and lavish traffic in paint’ suggests flow and ...”

“... about all of this is Mitchell, who teaches at an institution whose mascot is not Barney but Aristotle? When Robert Bakker urges us in The Dinosaur Heresies (1986) to say, when we see Canada geese flying north, ‘The dinosaurs are migrating, it must be spring!’ we know, Mitchell argues, ‘that the cart is pulling the horse’. Surely this is a charge ...”

“... designed to break with more traditional conceptions of the foundation of narrative, which, from Aristotle to Lessing, and from Hegel to Lukács and Ricoeur, had been temporal. In L’Education sentimentale, Lukács wrote in his Theory of the Novel, ‘time is indissolubly wedded to the form,’ and this could easily be said of the genre as a whole. How ...”

“... documents which clearly stated that God was everywhere. Even some garbage from mistranslations of Aristotle that said “Nature abhorred a vacuum” was taken to mean that Nature just fucking wouldn’t allow one at all and that Boyle was an idiot.’ But ‘Sir Robert’ and his mates ignored the Catholics, and that was truly a Good Thing. Kary Mullis on ...”

“... the story and the writing of the dialogue. On the central importance of plot Hitchcock agreed with Aristotle; characterisation and dialogue came later. Initially called From amongst the Dead, the title of the novel on which it was based, Vertigo, we learn from Auiler’s production history, went through several drafts and three different writers: first the ...”

“... with G.H. Lewes’s Biographical History of Philosophy, he had worked his way through Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. For most Plebs students, however, what little was then available of Marx and Engels was insufficient to fulfil this philosophical quest. Marx might have shown that changes in ideas resulted from changes in ...”

“... as social significance. He knows, really, that criticism is an ancient discipline beginning with Aristotle and Classical rhetoric, and concentrating its expertise on the techniques of literature, drama and oratory. (At least, he knew it when he wrote Walter Benjamin.) But here he must pretend that criticism in England began with the Enlightenment and the ...”

“... defined in terms of a ‘heroic’ degree of virtue – an idea which goes back, via Aquinas, to Aristotle. The methods for recognising the possessors of such virtue became more bureaucratic, in Max Weber’s sense of the term: in other words, recruitment procedures were standardised and formalised. In the trials for sanctity the evidence was graded and ...”