“... in magic, science has always had its public. There have been scientific books since, let’s say, Aristotle. But the scientific journal was something new. Who were Oldenburg’s readers, and what were they after? It may be that one should think of them as akin to present-day readers of New Scientist: practical people, with a bent for observation, or full of ...”

“... and more foule thanne any beest of the erthe,’ which is more like a misquotation of something Aristotle said in the Politics than a misquotation of Homer. In 1500, the great gatherer of words Desiderius Erasmus produced a collection of Adagia, which swelled in successive editions to include more than four thousand sayings and proverbs (‘war is sweet to ...”

“... While interned, he read Goethe, Winckelmann, Schiller, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle and Freud – which shows that the redemptive power of literature has its limits, because he emerged utterly unrepentant. He told the Sunday Pictorial that he had not changed his ideas one inch. ‘I do not retract anything that I have either said or ...”

“... which most readers of fiction will have grasped whether or not they are aware of having done so. Aristotle claimed that characters in comedy tend to have ordinary names, and this seems to have been largely true of the New Comedy of Menander. But comic dramatists also often seem to have been attracted to what Anne Barton has called Cratylic names – those ...”

“... to ‘put on a different kind of thinking-cap’ before they try to understand, for example, why Aristotle explained motion and fall as he did. Historians of science have now grasped that it is pointless to condemn past thinkers for what now seem obvious mistakes, and more rewarding to tease out the assumptions that make sense of what looks like nonsense to ...”

“... made by the jurors in court, where Democles will soon end up.) In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle wonders if it would be going too far to attempt to regulate jokes and to draw a line between wit and buffonery (which he defines as getting a laugh at any cost even if it causes pain to the object of the joke) before concluding that the liberal and ...”

“... many impulses as possible with the least sacrifice or curtailment. Like almost all criticism from Aristotle to Northrop Frye, Richards makes the formalist assumption that unity and coherence are goods in themselves, a value-judgment which his system presupposes rather than demonstrates. It is just that he replaces a traditional Romantic organicism with a more ...”

“... line of theorists who have explored how eyes, brains and artworks might relate stretches back to Aristotle, taking in Leonardo, Kant and Freud. The book is a chronological survey of 25 such thinkers. Or in fact more than that, a neurological survey: Onians, a would-be physician to the physicians, sets out to examine the brain workings of these ...”

“... now possible to look at Marx without the distortions of the Cold War. ‘We continue to learn from Aristotle or Machiavelli without having to become Aristotelians or Machiavellians,’ he wrote. ‘One day, I hope we shall be able to learn again from Marx in the same fashion.’ But Marx could never be a subject of merely academic concern for Stedman ...”

“... his favourite writers: Plutarch, Seneca, Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, Catullus, Cicero, Plato, Aristotle. The Essays are woven through with quotations, around which Montaigne meditates. Sometimes a single passage will prompt a lengthy reflection; sometimes Montaigne collects quotations around a theme like entries in a commonplace book. Old and new, ancient ...”

“... are then discussed: first, an account found in some classical philosophers, particularly in Aristotle, which locates the ethical life, the life of virtue and reason, as central to the development of an individual’s well-being in the fullest sense of that term. Williams offers strong criticism of much of ...”

“... War because it deflected popular anger away from him.What we do know from Thucydides, Aristotle and Plutarch is that Pericles had instituted strict racial criteria for Athenian citizenship: every citizen had to have two Athens-born parents, which caused trouble for his own immigrant second wife. He had achieved power by having his rivals ...”

“... for philosophical truth. Confucianism was ‘transformed into a state ideology’. If we think of Aristotle, the tutor to Alexander, rather than Socrates, say, or Augustine, we have an idea of the way the Confucians situated themselves. Scholars with practical advice to offer could change policy, if they were lucky enough not to be purged, but only at the ...”

“... too are mediated, given to us as a story within the story.There is a more serious problem, and Aristotle supplies its formulation: ‘The unity of a plot does not consist, as some suppose, in its having one man as its subject. An infinity of things befall that one man, some of which it is impossible to reduce to unity; and in like manner there are many ...”

“... had historically dismissed the significance of slavery: the treatment of slave labour in Plato and Aristotle anticipated the later disregard for other forms of unfree or non-industrial labour – women’s unpaid labour, or that carried out by indentured workers and peasants – in Marxism. Marx and Engels had failed to break with bourgeois epistemology and ...”