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“... 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 ...”

“... loosely terms them, and the chorus intones: Time Is all gone for the Greeks now … I wonder if Plato and Aristotle in all their wisdom foresaw Greece ending in these far-off Mountains, in this freezing night. Beyond the Mountains showed the extraordinary ability to absorb and adapt the qualities of alien forms that served Rexroth so well in his ...”

“... not for intercollegiate football, which heresiarchs like Hutchins banish from new churches much as Plato suggested be done with ...”

“... his mother money. In the vacations he mixed hard work – one summer he translated 360 pages of Plato in a fortnight – and ‘violent exercise’. He seems to have achieved near total sublimation of the energies later generations of undergraduates would invest in trying to get laid. Girls were exotic creatures, rarely sighted, and in any case, Ursula ...”

“... of Greek mythology, a realm of great dignity and breathtaking sadness. There he sees Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, ‘the master of those who know’, along with a host of Greek and Arabic philosophers, the physicians Hippocrates and Galen, the Amazons Camilla and Penthesilia, Aeneas, Julius Caesar, the sultan Saladin, and others renowned for their wisdom ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”