“... could come up with principles of justice, and then imagine acting on them, perhaps in some utopia. Plato, whose thoughts about justice have often been read in this way, imagines Dike¯ , the personified figure of Justice in the Laws, tagging along behind the Almighty and meting out condign punishment to malefactors. In similar vein, the late G.A. Cohen argued ...”

“... evil, and then denies that the acts are evil, precisely because they are idealistic. Thus Plato argues in the Meno and elsewhere that wrongdoing can occur only in ignorance. The best of the arguments says that whatever you want to pursue, you see as being good; so you cannot knowingly want to pursue what you see as bad. As it’s a fact of common ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for the week beginning 21 October 1940, for instance, included Dr Unger on ‘Greek Philosophy: Plato (continued)’, Mr Stadler on ‘History of Medieval Culture (continued)’, and Professor Marx, ‘Study Group on Goethe’. The exiled journalist Rudolf Olden was also interned there, and ‘in the exceptionally fine summer of 1940’ delivered ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... study the Kabbala and Koran, and mixed what he learned there with whatever he gleaned from reading Plato and the Latin poets in the original languages. The resulting syncretic brew was definitely a minority taste among readers, but Herder soon developed it and became an arms-length disciple. It was through Herder that Goethe came to know of him, and eventually ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sight. Long on abuse and short on detail, The Psychoanalytic Movement scolds Freudians, ‘Plato and other credulous humans’ so roundly that you start to stick up for the underdog. One weakness in Gellner’s argument is descriptive: deferring to the Unconscious – ‘A Cunning Bastard’, ‘A daemon ... strong and devious’ – he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... incapacities, he became a remarkably well-read intellectual, with a passion for Nietzsche, for Plato and Neoplatonism, for learned Italian things, obscure histories and occult treatises. Like some other poets, including Shakespeare, he gives one the impression that what he read was more or less exactly what he needed for purposes of his own. He acquired ...”

“... texts in an attempt to read past them into the origins of epic and to flesh out Homer’s world. Plato noticed that the heroes of the Iliad did not eat fish, although they were encamped by the Hellespont. Others working at the great library of Alexandria noticed that fish were eaten in the Odyssey and concluded that the two epics must have had different ...”

“... and stare him down. Heidegger’s own writing combined enormous respect for such predecessors as Plato and Nietzsche with a fierce will to be free of them. Derrida has the same filial relation to Heidegger himself. Having done to Heidegger what Heidegger did to Nietzsche is the negative achievement which, after all the chatter about ‘deconstruction’ is ...”

“... support, no core, no sense of urgency.’ Irwin’s pursuit of an art without history led him to Plato and Kant – to philosophy, not art history. And his education in art began with motor-cars, not drawing. Growing up in California in the Forties, he felt that the car was the ‘key pivotal item’. It had to be ‘real good because it had to have an edge ...”

“... to be barking up the wrong tree. The point is that for Vico mathematics does not, as it does for Plato or 17th-century rationalists, give true knowledge of some realm, whether of physical nature or the world of essences: it is more akin to a game, where the correct application of arbitrary rules ensures validity, but gives no information about anything. Even ...”