“... 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 ...”

“... the character-revealing power of the face and bodily bearing, was attributed in the Middle Ages to Aristotle himself. Such ambivalence persisted into the 18th century. Diderot often respectfully alluded to physiognomy in his philosophical writings and applied it in his fictional character descriptions. Sterne, on the other hand, arranged that Walter Shandy’s ...”

“... de futuro and de praesenti spousals. And so on. She does not know what ‘hubris’ means, and Aristotle would not recognise her use of hamartia. The textual critical foundations of her work are old and rotten. She claims to follow received opinion over dating, but does not hesitate to put Lucrece before Henry VI, Timon before King Lear and Pericles after ...”

“... most, if not all, mainstream analytic philosophy has treated as marginal: that which looks back to Aristotle and that which looks back to Hegel. Without this double sense of philosophical problems as rooted in a whole range of intellectual and everyday activities and as having a systematic and synoptic character, philosophy is all too apt to degenerate, or at ...”

“... of Division, acquires great importance here as a device for freeing characters from something that Aristotle regarded as the strength of tragedy, but which for Bayley is one of drama’s basic limitations: hero and action as naturally suited companions. It is therefore surprising to learn on page 165 that ‘both Hamlet and Macbeth are wholly at home in the ...”

“... most members of the ‘pull yourself together’ school, took this principle to be axiomatic (pace Aristotle, Blake, Freud). Since a paralysed individual can in fact feel fear, the theory is patently false. James later modified it in such a way that the perception of a visceral response becomes the emotional experience. You feel fear, as an unacknowledged ...”

“... heavy and ill-placed gland. Plato and Galen regarded the head as the seat of rationality, but Aristotle, that object lesson in encouraging us to beware of armchair brains, revived the Homeric view, and for centuries taught us to think of the brain as no more than an elaborate cooling-plant for the organism. The emergence of our modern views can be traced ...”

“... of a writer for his craft which we sense in Ben Jonson when he says that a writer might find in Aristotle ‘not only ... the way not to err, but the short way we should take not to err’. The idea was common, and Jonson is in fact translating from the Latin of the Dutchman Heinsius. The Latin lacks the fervour of practicality which Jonson made largely his ...”

“... commerce and coinage, and the capacity for abstract thinking which found ultimate expression in Aristotle and Plato. It would be ridiculous to say George Thomson’s ideas are refuted, or even contested, by such an argument (and he is unmentioned in the book’s bibliography). But the turn of thought is characteristic of An Unfinished History. Its writer ...”

“... specify: ‘plus a couple of weeks for the old verities’.   Is this all that everything from Aristotle to Trilling, from Horace and Sidney to Eliot and Empson, amounts to? The old verities? I find this lacking in verity. But few students taking up graduate work in literature are starting from scratch; as undergraduates they will have studied literature ...”

“... methodology’. But rhetoric, Posner goes on to argue, is not mere presentation: it is, as Aristotle proposed, a method of reasoning and one which has an interesting relationship to legal pragmatism, postulating as the latter does that judges will – and should – ‘stretch clauses ... when there is a compelling practical case or imperative felt ...”

“... where they did their best work. Like so much else, it all began in Greece. Pedants still call Aristotle the Stagirite after his city of birth. Archimedes was a research student in Alexandria before going home to make Syracuse the Berkeley of his day. Nevertheless children aren’t attracted to the sciences. I’m not at all sure that the choice against ...”

“... in the rhetorical devices which shape character, and her concern with rhetoric extends from Aristotle to Kenneth Burke, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. There is a suggestion that reading characters is a form of ‘ethical self-fashioning’, even if the character is a villain or, for male readers, ‘woman as Other’. Desmet offers at the outset what ...”