“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to Thomas Aquinas, is a vir occasionatus, a defective or mutilated man – this he got from Aristotle, but he used it to explain why Eve was created second, from a crooked bone: she was made to fall. To be fair, Adam also blames God a little: ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’ Adam acts like a ...”

“... worse, they are ‘timid barbarians’ – a reference to the slavish scholastic admiration of Aristotle in Oxford and Cambridge. For the Anglophone reader, the Canzoniere and Trionfi are blueprints for the great outpouring of late Tudor love poetry. But the first English response to Petrarch came in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – begun a decade or so ...”

“... because, in the act of payback, which has to be mimetic of the original offence, it is what Aristotle said drama was as a whole: an imitation of an action. In his interviews, as in his practice, Walcott was attracted to the art of imitation but criticised what he called mimicry, not the colonial mimicry of the imperial centre that V.S. Naipaul wrote ...”

“... he saw it as an ancient discipline defined by an established canon of texts running from Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Heidegger and Levinas; and his aim as a teacher was to get his students to love the classics. On occasion he would offer useful summaries, saying for example that Levinas saw time not as ‘a succession of instants … but the response to ...”

“... is BAD.’ Classical thinkers would have tended to agree, if not on quite the same grounds. Aristotle thought that the life of tradesmen and mechanics was ‘ignoble and inimical to virtue’. He rather approved of the way that Thebes disqualified business types from public office until they had been retired for ten years. In The Laws, Plato deplores ...”

“... This homely dialectical routine is, I suppose, the basis of all our traditions of moral education. Aristotle started from the premise that ‘the good man should be a lover of self,’ and Jesus took the next step with the injunction to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself.’ In the beginning – the assumption goes – you care for nobody except yourself; but ...”

“... and science, dictate. Thales, who along with Pythagoras and Democritus (not to mention Plato and Aristotle) is responsible at least for what the Sceptics find in law and custom, art and science, would have been pleased. The bottoms of wells, quite by accident, turned out to be very good vantage-points for gazing at the stars. And gazing at the stars, in ...”

“... proposal must be grasped. In a sense the philosophical revision I am describing was always, after Aristotle, the deeper conviction of the aesthetic. Shklovsky himself always implied a kind of convergence between signified and referent: the fabula – the mythic raw materials – was in that sense both all at once and constituted the facts, so to speak, but ...”