“... idiom for an old way of thinking: the rationalist humanism that stretches back to Descartes and Plato. When Chomsky was starting out, his rationalism cut against the grain of conventional wisdom in philosophy and psychology. Both disciplines were dominated by a distrust of what Gilbert Ryle called ‘the ghost in the machine’ – the elusive, invisible ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... money, which they use to cement their power. Democracy inclines towards toxic populism, just as Plato warned. Capitalism inclines towards self-serving oligarchy, just as Marx predicted. Each works only if the other is there.Wolf would like to think that democracy and capitalism suit each other, despite their differences. Both rest on an idea of individual ...”

“... until they were all swept away by Solzhenitsyn.I like to quote Joseph Brodsky’s lines from ‘Plato Elaborated’: ‘There would be a café in that city with a quite/decent blancmange, where, if I should ask why/we need the 20th century, when we already/have the 19th, my colleague would stare fixedly at his fork or his knife.’ Even as the 21st ...”

“... claim. The idea of a spherical globe had been dreamed up by the Pythagoreans and taken over by Plato and Aristotle, but (not surprisingly) more as a theory of perfect form than as a physical concept based on observation. (Aristotle noticed that new stars appeared and old ones vanished as one travelled north or south; but had he never asked himself why ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... moralising history of the modern world written by its early winners – the many Plato-to-Nato accounts of the global flowering of democracy, liberal capitalism and human rights – has long been in need of drastic revision. At the very least, it must incorporate the experiences of late-developing nations: their fraught and often tragic ...”

“... love that powered England’s great heroes, Nelson and Wellington, and they were not radicals). Plato remarks in the Republic that the great liberator is also the great enslaver: and this was the hard political text learned by Romantic poets through most of Coleridge’s lifetime. Yet probably political defeat disheartened him less than the condition of his ...”

“... or Cambridge scholar produced anything comparable to Grote’s history of Greece and his work on Plato and Aristotle. Although Classical education flourished in the public schools and in the ancient universities, critical scholarship had little part in it. Teachers in these institutions were far more interested in translation from English into the Ancient ...”

“... one’s initial questions, the less sure one is of knowing what counts as a good question. Reading Plato or Kant or Hegel in search of help for answers to antecedently formulated questions is not a profitable use of their work. Such thinkers, read in this way, can easily wind up sounding as silly as Nozick makes Hegel when he says ‘Hegel’s theory leaves us ...”

“... paradigm of The Anxiety of Influence when I turned the page and read: ‘Yeats wrote that “Plato thought nature but a spume that plays/Against a ghostly paradigm of things.” ’ However, this is probably what Bloom calls a ‘strong misreading’; the swerve from Yeats’s text doesn’t seem to me to help Yeats, but that is not the point. Opinion as ...”

“... this biography: that his massive two volumes entitled Political Philosophy took their place with Plato, Aristotle and Montesquieu in the syllabus for the paper in ‘History and Political Philosophy’ which formed part of the Cambridge Moral Sciences Tripos from 1860 to 1867! There is nevertheless an important intellectual dimension which certainly forms ...”

“... fuse of history’s teleo: Arise and repossess The surplus value of your swindled consciousness! Plato thought nature plagiarises spirit: Being determines consciousness determined Marx: But in the contradictions of the Way The human dialectic osculates and arcs And quarrels to insert Some transient motive in the motiveless inert. By getting right the proper ...”

“... as a motto for his book. In 1944 he wrote to Drury that he was reading the Theaetetus: ‘Plato in this dialogue is occupied with the same problems that I am writing about.’ In 1948 Drury was reading the Parmenides and said he couldn’t make head or tail of it. Wittgenstein: ‘That dialogue seems to me among the most profound of ...”

“... it is hard to resist some qualms at the inclusion of Homer. The omission as yet of Aristotle and Plato (as indeed of Mahomet) is no doubt purely temporary. But, on any reading of the concept of authority, it is a little surprising to find Godwin and Herzen figuring in the initial list of Masters. Here perhaps the editor’s well-founded appreciation of his ...”