“... Pico arrived in Florence in 1484, Ficino had just finished, at that very hour, his translation of Plato. Ficino had a theory that the meeting was divinely ordained, and they argued over which of them was Plato reincarnated.Pico was in his early twenties, tall, good-looking and a genius. He was also rich. He ate off silver ...”

“... subject, improves the way you think. Besides which, it enables you to read, for example, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Sappho, Sophocles, Euclid, Hippocrates, Archimedes, Lucretius, Seneca, Livy, Tacitus, Virgil, Ovid, not to mention Descartes: for all sorts of reasons, I wouldn’t want to live in a world in which no one understood them. And I ...”

“... epistemai, the standard ‘modern’ account of what was wrong with philosophy is that, ever since Plato, it has aimed at universal, ahistorical norms: that it has been self-deceptively hunting for God-surrogates. Everybody has been trying to outdo his predecessors by distancing himself still further from Kant’s attempt to ‘ground’ things – and, in ...”

“... Thomas Hobbes, for Leviathan; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, for The Communist Manifesto; and Plato, for the Republic. Why them? Each of the candidates is hallowed as a Penguin Classic. Each has been foisted on freshman generations in Pol Phil 101. And each could be thought to exemplify, after a fashion, the aristocratic style in political ...”

“... Socrates, because he combined rationalising criticism of received opinions with mysticism and, if Plato can be taken literally, with metaphysics, was an ambiguous figure to the Victorians, and the ambiguity was heightened by the sharp contradictions between the ancient sources. Liberal Anglicans disapproved of the Sophists, who reminded them of the ...”

“... true, as it seemed to Whitehead, that the whole of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, then it must be equally true that the philosophical writing of the English-speaking peoples consists chiefly of ‘problems from Locke’. Not moral philosophy, for sure, but examinations of what we know, how we think, what there is, what a person is. It ...”

“... nor was it all he did for the understanding of classical Greece, for he was to go on to write Plato and the Other Companions of Socrates and an unfinished study of Aristotle. No Englishman of his time contributed so much to the study either of Greek history or of Greek philosophy, and no one at all has contributed comparably to both. Born in 1794, a year ...”

“... Birth of a Philosopher Plato was a young man when Helike sank below the waters of the gulf. The spasms of the earthquake could be felt all night, tugging at the roots of the city. For three days afterwards the ground subsided – rapidly at first, then gradually, caving and collapsing as if hauled by an enormous hand ...”

“... infamous Lord Braxfield in 1793, he declared that if what he had advocated was treasonable, then Plato, Harrington and David Hume were equally guilty. To the present-day student of Hume, Muir’s inclusion of him in his catalogue of reformers must appear even odder than his appeal to Plato: for Hume is usually and rightly ...”

“... When Alcibiades, in that dialogue of Plato’s entitled The Symposium, praises his master Socrates, beyond all doubt the prince of philosophers, he compares him, amongst other things, to a Silenus. Now a Silenus, in ancient days, was a little box, of the kind we see today in apothecaries’ shops, painted on the outside with such gay, comical figures as harpies, satyrs, bridled geese, horned hares, saddled ducks, flying goats, stags in harness, and other devices of that sort, light-heartedly invented for the purpose of mirth, as was Silenus himself, the master of good old Bacchus ...”

“... of philosophy. There was public argument and public polemic; and as for private reflection, did Plato not declare that thought is the soul bickering with itself? But second, ‘the very adversariality of Greek modes of inquiry seems to affect also the content of theories.’ Just as in the particular case of Plato, ‘the ...”

“... and times. She continued to read and review books in this field and started to write a book on Plato and Platonism in the early 1970s. This book, for one reason or another, was only partly written when she started her Grub Street career of ‘moonlighting’ and ‘writing on the run’, as she calls it with a bohemian flourish in a recent essay entitled ...”

“... on philosophers and in that on politicians and moralists, Professor Stanford has much to say about Plato’s hostility to poetry; he finds Aristotle’s more sympathetic attitude greatly preferable. He rightly points out that poetry does not move upon the same level as philosophy or politics, but he would have done better justice to ...”

“... her mysterious impediment. ‘She is almost entirely uninterested in the literature of Homer, Plato and Herodotus, or the literature of the later period, written in demotic Greek, which her fellow students wish to read in the original.’ Her teacher, conversely, is very interested in philosophy and its cold comfort; he repeats a talismanic quote from ...”

“... and stories about their characters and curious habits. He moved equably from Thales through Plato and Aristotle, to Zeno, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and eventually Epicurus, but his impartiality probably had less to do with scruples about objectivity than with uncomprehending indifference to philosophical questions, and a terrific appetite for gossip. If ...”