“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of its elements, which sometimes conform to the golden ratio celebrated by Pythagoras and Plato, she discovers Philip’s interest – slenderly attested in ancient sources – in the writings and thought of those philosophers. It remains to be seen whether Kottaridi’s redating of the Aegae palace will stand up to scrutiny, but her determination to ...”

“... logic underpinning totalitarianism: the collectivist, anti-rationalist and historicist ideas of Plato, Hegel and Marx. He claimed that they put tradition before reason and the collective before the individual, and that they believed in laws of history which could explain the past and predict the future. Popper saw this as dangerous nonsense. Grand theories ...”

“... historical continuum. He emphasises the dynamics of this mutual exchange, and reminds us that Plato warns, in the Charmides, that ‘gnothi seauton’ (‘know thyself’) is not enough if one is simply gazing at oneself in the mirror: such knowledge can be gained only in the complexity of social interaction. There are too many equations in Hirst’s ...”

“... adds in the ‘Third Anniversary Discourse’) the ‘sublime theories’ that ‘Pythagoras and Plato derived … from the same fountain with the sages of India’. This valorisation of Sanskrit and Indian culture more generally contrasts starkly with the dismissiveness of the 19th century, when for Macaulay ‘a single shelf of a good European library was ...”

“... hanker to swap the canned freedom of suburban Tupperware parties for fantasies of frottage beyond. Plato sums up the affective ping-pong in the Republic in the tale of Leontion, who is morbidly drawn to gaze on the rotting corpses of executed felons outside the Athenian walls, but is also indignant at himself for indulging this urge. The ejection of alien or ...”

“... impudence and naivety. Perhaps we could say that abstract art had always been parody – parody Plato, parody Monet or Moreau, parody Songs without Words – and what Richter did was return and return to the fact, as puzzle and instigation. ‘Cage (4)’ (2006) The show has many other aspects. I have said nothing, for example, of the mostly small or ...”

“... received impressions just as wax receives the imprint of a seal – a metaphor that derives from Plato. If the wax was too soft, as in women’s and children’s brains, impressions would be easily received but soon forgotten; if too rigid, it was difficult to learn new things. The function we now assign to the nerves was ascribed to pneuma or spiritus, a ...”

“... For them, the mirror of Dionysus was the material world itself. Proclus suggested that when Plato stated that the surface of the world was created smooth, he meant that it had a reflective surface like a mirror, and Plotinus had something similar in mind when he claimed that it was when the souls saw their images in ‘the mirror of Dionysus’ that ...”

“... of time on a deeper scale, in the face of evidence of inland beaches and catastrophic floods: when Plato makes up his lost island continent of Atlantis, he locates it nine thousand years before his own time. And encounters with tides inspire bigger notions of space, raising the question of ‘the totality, unity and coherence of the world we inhabit’. Before ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”