“... 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 ...”

“... of naked Celts marching on their city ‘panicked’ the Romans (the historian uses the same word Plato used to describe the impact of Charmides) in 225 BCE. They were an impressive sight, magnificent bodies, at the peak of condition. But when the Roman javelins began to fall, the Celts began to wish they had kept their trousers on. Their shields were too ...”

“... political upheaval, died on 21 June 1527, entertained by the possibility of meeting Seneca and Plato, both pagans, in hell. ‘The worst that can happen to you is that you’ll die and go to hell,’ he wrote in La Mandragola. ‘But how many others have died! And in hell how many worthy men there are!’Machiavelli’s​ contemporaries knew him as a ...”

“... that attend new ways of encountering texts, Duncan wheels out (to use his term) the passage from Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates argues that writing makes humans inattentive and forgetful. He could have said a little more about the ambiguities of that dialogue and the ambivalences of its author. At one point, Socrates comes out with some ...”

“... the family norm. In matters of academic politics, Descartes ‘was just one peculiar nut’, but Plato hasn’t got much company in thinking that philosophers make good politicians. His deference to Christina – comparing her to God – was ‘disgusting’, but ‘that’s the way you wrote to a queen in the 17th century’. He never enjoyed a normal ...”