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“... He is a man of wide culture and interests, quoting from and referring to philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer but finding everything human alien to himself. He sounds squeamish, contemptuous, cynical; sometimes like Malte in Rilke’s great novel (of 1910); sometimes like one of Chekhov’s tired, put-upon, dissuasive medical ...”

“... The great Victorian polymath William Whewell – master of Trinity, tidologist, translator of Plato, crystallographer, expert on German Gothic architecture and inventor of the word ‘scientist’ – said, regarding the scientific method: ‘An art of discovery is not possible, we can give no rules for the pursuit of truth which shall be universally and ...”

“... the most thickly populated, scatters references to Conrad (Joseph), Hesiod, Rilke, Shakespeare, Plato, Mann, George Eliot, Gide and St John. Quite how much Conrad may be coruscating on thin ice here and there is a question the book can’t help posing, as do the works of his fellow polymath and mandarin critic of modernity, George Steiner. Yet the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... world by creating the conditions of one that is wholly other. This is what the original Utopia and Plato’s Republic were aiming at. It is what we would call ideology which comes between the world outside and the shadows on the cavern wall. For Ricoeur, the utopian strategy can be the only possible escape – if escape it is – from the hermeneutical circle ...”

“... almost universal praise since his own time, and in ancient traditions is famed as a just ruler. Plato presents him as a guardian of free speech and reasoned argument, Cicero as a model of righteous empire. According to Isaiah, he was destined to ‘make justice shine upon the nations’. In the 20th century, Iranian shahs put him at the centre of national ...”

“... available evidence, he was drawing upon his traditionalist, Wykehamist zeal. True to his thesis in Plato Today, which located the totalitarian principle in ancient Athens, he identified the new Germany with Sparta. He was also doing something that ambitious intellectuals have been known to do before and since, which is to say that he was rating the ...”

“... focused but informed by a broad familiarity with the whole tradition of aesthetic commentary from Plato to the present day – a culture he wears lightly but uses to good effect. Parrinder’s attack on ‘the failure of theory’ is also supported by a clear sense of a desirable alternative to the present dispensation. One of his models is Raymond ...”

“... City Council as well as a WEA lecturer. Dalyell records that this author of a much-praised work on Plato pitched his council election campaign on a pledge to get North Oxford’s rubbish bins emptied not twice but three times a week. Would that some ambitious young intellectual in the Crossman mould were launching his political career with a similar pledge in ...”

“... there is also an older, rationalist, tradition of theorising about the mind; one that runs from Plato through Gall, Kant and the faculty psychologists, to Freud and Chomsky. It, too, has its proprietary metaphors, which are frequently architectural. The mind is like a building (Steven Mithen thinks it’s like a cathedral). Entrance and egress are variously ...”

“... taking these into account is the hallmark of all strictly political thinking.’ Thus ever since Plato ridiculed the role of mere doxa, or unsubstantiated and contingent opinions, in political life, defenders of the truth have portrayed politics as the realm of expediency, compromise, hypocrisy, manipulation and mere appearances. Whether in the form of ...”

“... is a work of art – I rank it right up there with the dialogues composed by Hume or Berkeley or Plato. He made us see a theorem, a mathematical fact, coming into being before our eyes. In the text, several students and their teacher gradually evolve conjectures, counter-examples and lemmas. The footnotes chime in with the historical incidents that underlie ...”

“... in their minds as well as in the books they carried in their pockets.’ As late as the 1950s, Plato’s Republc was taken out more often from Merthyr’s public library than from any other in Great Britain. For workers like this, Engels had struck an unexpected chord when he argued in Ludwig Feuerbach that the proletariat were the true heirs of the ...”

“... this rubbish and added to it some vaguely historical and cultural talk: he even manages to mention Plato. What emerges is less a picture of anything that could be called an aristocracy than the portrait of a Cambridge-educated historian and journalist (late 20th-century) with his mind softened by the media. It is softened to the point of extinction but the ...”

“... of reality, artists as the most dedicated system-builders become leading citizens: but if, as Plato proposed, the ‘real’ in some sense exists, and artists merely fake it, then there is no place for them in the ideal republic. A number of arguments can be tried to defend the ‘truth’ of what the artist does, but most high-minded claims are out for ...”