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“... think of a mathematics based on deductive proof, as opposed to the fanciful numerology recorded in Aristotle’s On the Beliefs of the Pythagoreans, of which the following is an example:Marriage, they said, is five, because it is the union of male and female, and according to them the odd is male and the even female, and five is the first number to be ...”

“... Hunt, Earl Warren, George H.W. Bush, Duong Van Minh, the John Birch Society, the Freemasons or Aristotle Onassis. ‘I am not a conspiracy theorist,’ he begins. ‘I am a conspiracy empiricist.’ He wants to know the truth because without it ‘another president could once more be cut down in his or her prime.’ One chapter of the book recounts the ...”

“... large-scale violence: the young Alexander’s taming of the horse Bucephalas; his education under Aristotle; his devotion to his close friend (and possible lover) Hephaestion; his marriage to Roxane, an Iranian chieftain’s daughter. Such moments soften the hard edges of the historical record.The spread of the Alexander legends is mirrored in the great theme ...”

“... of excellences of human character, the so-called virtues. But, taking himself to be following Aristotle, he thinks that it is only within a particular kind of social order that adequate ethical concepts can be embedded: one in which there are fixed and determinate ends to human life; and it is this very idea that modernity has rendered problematic. Thus ...”

“... mention of it; philosophers have long since forgotten the Platonic maxim, famously repeated by Aristotle, that wonder is the beginning of philosophy. The downward slide from first of the passions to ignominious neglect had already begun in the 18th century: Fontenelle, Hume and other philosophes regarded wonder as a bumptious passion, associated with ...”

“... concocted various recipes for wonder, but they almost all shopped at the same store, the texts of Aristotle.’ According to Aristotle, astonishment, in and of itself, is a bad thing: arrested by a wonderful effect, the subject should be stimulated into overcoming his temporary mental paralysis by seeking an understanding ...”

“... of women. Nonetheless, he argues, this gives us no reason to feel morally superior. Apart from Aristotle, who made a desperate attempt to justify it by arguing that it was natural and just, the Greeks did not generally approve of slavery as a just institution. They regarded it as a great calamity for the person enslaved, and a few explicitly said that it ...”

“... and moral history which has produced this dilemma. The philosophical hero of After Virtue is Aristotle; and the broad conception which it offers of the nature of the good reasons which human beings possess for living their lives in one way rather than another is taken predominantly from Aristotle. What a man has good ...”

“... it is a matter of aesthetics. For instruction in the preferred ethical approach we must go back to Aristotle. Aristotle had high ethical standards. He believed children can’t be happy, since they are still incapable of noble acts. The mature, he thought, cannot expect to escape the misfortunes of their declining years. The ...”

“... at least until they were ‘purged of error’. Before the mid-12th century, only two of Aristotle’s logical tractates were known, translated by Boethius in antiquity. But from roughly 1150 to 1270, his entire corpus became available in Latin, usually via Arabic, accompanied by commentaries from the Islamic scholar Averroes (Ibn Rushd). Not ...”

“... the matter more forcefully in their remarkably articulate language?’ Why did ‘even the wise Aristotle fail to perceive the black hole in the story, something crucially unaccounted for?’ Because, in Young’s view, he was irremediably lost behind the veil of civilisation – a veil that for ever threatens to hide from view the inevitability of ...”

“... about something else’; ‘If the finest modern experts agree with one another – and even with Aristotle – about a central point, it just has to be wrong.’ Not everyone would describe what Charles and Mary don’t say in their versions of Shakespeare as ‘this silence of the Lambs’, and Belknap’s reading of a book title mentioned in Rabelais ...”

“... 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 Diogenes ...”

“... To the dismay of some traditional scholars, Aquinas was convinced that the thought of the pagan Aristotle offered the most philosophically resourceful means of expounding the Christian faith, and it is for this mighty synthesis above all that he has earned his place among the philosophical immortals. The conflict over ...”

“... used to be one, right from the days of myth. Then they parted, like a nagging married couple, with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and that beastly Kant. So the novel went sloppy and philosophy went abstract-dry. The two should come together again – in the novel. Why in the novel? ‘You may know a truth but if it’s at all complicated you have to be an ...”