“... 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 ...”

“... belief – he shows no concern with the far deeper problem of what it is to have a thought at all. Plato explained thinking as speaking silently to oneself, but this is certainly not in general correct. Analytical philosophy is nevertheless founded upon the idea that, since language is the most perspicuous vehicle of thought, we can best explain what thought ...”

“... to him. More recently, scholars have made much of his relations to Locke and Hume rather than to Plato. The most formidable defence of Shelley is Harold Bloom’s Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959). Bloom dealt with the case by shifting its ground. We are to read Shelley as ‘an agnostic mythmaker’: ‘from his concrete I-Thou relationships, the poet can dare ...”

“... Fregean, the Kripkean, the Popperian, the Whiteheadian and the Heideggerian will each re-educate Plato in a different way before starting to argue with him,’ Rorty charmingly remarks. But why do we need to canonise dead philosophers at all? ‘I do not think we can get along without canons,’ Rorty replies: This is because we cannot get along without ...”

“... grey-cream mass to the casual eye, was regarded as an inconveniently 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 ...”

“... infuse me with your spirit, as you did when you tore Marsyas from the covering of his limbs.’ Plato said that the strains of the pipes, which he excluded from the Republic, indicated those who were in need of the Gods. With Titian’s Marsyas, so far from suffering cruelty, it appears that a need has been fulfilled. His eyes have a rapt and trance-like ...”

“... distance between what we are and what we can imagine ourselves to be. In this he was, as he said, Plato’s disciple. While Plato had an aristocratic vision of a rational city, Rousseau had an egalitarian one: but both are psychological explorations which reveal that we are utterly incapable of bearing the moral cost of ...”

“... to romanticism and individualism. His avowed indebtedness to the thinkers of ancient Greece, to Plato and Aristotle and the philosophers of his own youth, fell foul of the new cult of originality and the new Hellenism. The founders of modern Classical scholarship repaid their debt to their best informant on post-Aristotelian philosophy, on Roman Republican ...”

“... The system we have is predicated on advocacy – that is, on presentation. David Pannick excavates Plato, Cicero and Quintilian for quotations about the deceptive and illusory characteristics of the art. But, as he would agree, the image of the advocate as conjuror is far too simple. In a process which is not single-mindedly devoted to finding the ...”

“... to come Southey would follow the curriculum of his generation. From the republican doctrines of Plato and Milton, he graduated to the rational reformism of Godwin’s Political Justice, a tract of history, theory and moral science that proved the determinism of all thought and action. Since rational change had to be non-violent and could take place only in ...”