“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... true? Haydon claims to have got his story from Talfourd, but that proves nothing. Eye-witnesses (Aristotle observed) are inclined to embroider upon good stories, to divert the audience – that is how history and the art of fiction originated – and Talfourd or Haydon might well have inserted those ‘Sirs’ to indicate Hazlitt’s resemblance, when he was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... He really is, to all intents and purposes, an unpolitical man. Unlike Hobbes or Plato or Aristotle (Gay compares him to all three), Freud shows no informed interest in social institutions. His observations on the danger of ‘the psychological misery of the masses’, which, Freud claims, leads to the ‘identification of the members’ of those ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.’ The distinction was fragile and questionable – if Nietzsche was a hedgehog I’m a walrus – but in any case was only a set-up for an argument about Tolstoy. Hedgehog or ...”

“... killing, torture also poses awkward problems for philosophical naturalism. For naturalists like Aristotle, if a thing manifests descriptive properties characteristic of that thing – such as having a certain shape, size or colour – it follows that the thing has evaluative properties too. So if a torturer proves adept at extracting information or ...”

“... produced in Athens by Athenian citizens (Thucydides, Plato, Demosthenes) or long-term residents (Aristotle, Lysias). But what does the fact that so many of the best-known authors came from Athens tell us? That it was a thriving cultural centre able to dominate in this field as well. Chalk up another victory for those clever Athenians. Despite the air of ...”

“... they held all things in common. Both Plato’s vision of common ownership in the Republic and Aristotle’s passionate critique of it are presented in terms familiar to us. Aristotle was no friend to usury or indeed to moneymaking generally, but he argued strongly that common ownership led to slacking and squabbling and ...”