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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but incompatible yet equally valid stances. In the tradition of virtue ethics, as derived from Aristotle, some moral dilemmas are ‘tragic’. They occur when two agents largely agree on the virtues relevant to a situation yet come to different conclusions as to the best way to act. Acknowledging this can avoid a breakdown in the relationships between ...”

“... from ancient speeches and handbooks. Our own terms of rhetorical analysis go back directly to Aristotle and Cicero (it’s common to point out that Barack Obama, or his speech writers, have learned their best tricks from Cicero). And so far as the House of Commons is concerned, those 19th-century gentlemen who devised, or enshrined, most of the ...”

“... a diamond – the large middle class between a small upper class and a small lower class, which Aristotle thought was the best guarantee of political stability. Taken together, these two concomitant trends go a long way to explain the difference which is neatly captured in two remarks by two different observers. The first is Kenneth Galbraith, in The ...”

“... of the Greeks and to give them a little Christian twist or kink, much as, say, Aquinas did with Aristotle, or as T.S. Eliot does in his plays. In Walk the Line, Joaquin Phoenix, playing Cash, is clearly on a mythic journey: there is first the early trauma, the violent death of Cash’s older brother; then there’s Cash out on the open road, the young ...”

“... some of the things students said to him about Isabella, including the kid who argued, invoking Aristotle on continence, that ‘unwanted sex is not a trivial consideration.’ Chastity, in this view, means upholding ‘a standard of personal integrity that really is “more” valuable than the life of a brother who is himself, after all, incontinent’. A ...”

“... theory. Galileo’s findings drew opposition from university men affronted at the challenge to Aristotle and Ptolemy, and from clergy who objected that the new view of the heavens contradicted scriptural passages such as Joshua 10:12-13, in which Joshua commanded the Sun not to set until the Israelites could complete a massacre:Then spake Joshua to the ...”

“... way from infancy to feel joy and grief at the right things: true education is precisely this. Aristotle, Ethics In ‘Civilised Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness’, Freud makes a simple and still astonishing assertion: ‘The sexual behaviour of a human being often lays down the pattern for all his other modes of reacting to life.’ Integral to ...”