“... tourists take in the Island of Aristotle on the Sea of Cold, and then press on to a town called Plato, which is said to be the perfect commonwealth though it is hard to tell as you would have to spend 14 years in quarantine before being allowed in. Another highlight is the chance to relax with the whimsical Irishry of John Duns Scotus, surrounded as he is ...”

“... arrives at are thus apodictic, rather like the truths of geometry. Such a comfort. Ever since Plato, philosophers have envied geometers their certitudes. So it’s not surprising that the story about philosophy being conceptual analysis was well received all the way from Oxford to Berkeley, with many intermediate stops. Still, there was felt to be trouble ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of him – and there is some wonderful commentary in this book, particularly on Diaphanéité, Plato and Platonism and Marius – he defines better than anyone else the unique paradox of Pater’s position: that he was antinomial without being oppositional. He found a way of being adversarial that wasn’t merely a relish for conflict. Pater didn’t go ...”

“... logical and persuasive arguments as with the various proofs of the immortality of the soul from Plato on down: we admire them and cannot for the moment quite remember why it is we are not at once persuaded. In Scruton’s case, it is surely the fact of history, whose omission makes the argumentation so flawless. I have to say that I think (rightly or ...”

“... agreement on the topic of the belief. Your beliefs about God, Clough and Wordsworth – and about Plato and Derrida, for that matter – do not, or at least should not, come with a social price tag. In a properly tolerant democratic society, nobody would worry much about their fellow citizens’ religious, aesthetic or philosophical views. For everybody would ...”

“... are moved? These are complex questions which have generated a long tradition of speculation, from Plato to Rousseau and beyond. Much of the credibility of passion depends on context. The theatre is a space set aside for heightened response, and this response is often without consequence; this is why Rousseau thought that art might insulate us from ...”

“... of Oxford’s rising liberals to tidy up Christianity. He found Benjamin Jowett’s Hegelised Plato a poor substitute for St Paul and skipped Matthew Arnold’s poetry lectures because they clashed with cricket matches. All the same, he thrived. He won a fellowship at Merton. He translated French roundelays and befriended Walter Pater. It was a world in ...”

“... She also posts pictures of the contents of Arendt’s library – ‘all the old friends … Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Goethe, Rilke’, in the words of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendt’s former student and first biographer – as well as her manuscripts, typed then scribbled on and sometimes cut up and stuck back together: ‘One can almost see ...”

“... or frivolity of any kind. The boy started Greek at the age of three, and was soon studying Plato’s dialogues in the original, along with arithmetic and ancient history, before moving on to Latin and logic and spending a year in Montpellier as a student of natural science. By that time he had started calling himself a utilitarian – apparently the ...”

“... envisaged it, ‘a kind of comedy. Mediterranean brightness and frivolity; Aristophanes hooting Plato off the stage’. This is a strange, slightly convoluted argument (note the none too dainty pirouette on the word ‘outside’, for example), yet in many ways it is very persuasive. In 1923, Picasso was spouting Nietzscheanisms like ‘art is a lie ...”

“... to the understanding of natural phenomena, which was pioneered by the Pythagoreans and by Plato, and culminated in the astronomical model proposed by Eudoxus of Cnidus (408-355 BC), who suggested that the complex paths of the celestial bodies – including the planets’ apparent retrograde motion at one point in their cycle – could be explained by ...”

“... chained to the car’ – Napoleon, Voltaire, Frederick (the Great), Kant, Catherine (the Great), Plato, Alexander (the Great), Aristotle, Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Constantine, ‘the Anarchs old’ – before describing ‘how and by what paths I have been brought/To this dread pass’.One spring morning, Rousseau found himself ‘asleep/Under a ...”

“... Dissatisfaction with writing as a sterile medium of art and instruction goes back at least to Plato (whose attack on writing we would not possess but for generations of transcribers), but in our own century the influential theories of Derrida have attempted to reverse the priority of voice over text which, for different reasons, was also a cardinal ...”