Search Results

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as any legal obligation. Antonio shows his love for Bassanio by staking a pound of flesh. Aristotle declared that ‘all things are common among friends’ and a surprisingly large number of Renaissance humanists agreed. According to Montaigne, friends should share ‘wills, thoughts, judgments, goods, wives, children, honour and lives’. Generosity ...”

“... a getaway car? Many political thinkers have found themselves exiled by choice or force, including Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Lenin, Berlin, Arendt, Shklar and Machiavelli himself. Cicero was decapitated while trying to hot-foot it from Rome; according to Cassius Dio, his tongue was pulled out and jabbed with ...”

“... differently from masters, but they looked disturbingly similar. One neat solution was provided by Aristotle, who claimed that some people are slaves because they have slavish souls. But in time of war, it might become awkwardly obvious that enslavement could happen to anybody. Plautus’ play The Captives seems to deal with precisely this issue: a master ...”

“... 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 ...”