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Thomas Jones: Dodgy Latin, 20 February 2003

... 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 ...

Posties

Richard Rorty, 3 September 1987

Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen 
by Jürgen Habermas.
Suhrkamp, 302 pp., £54, February 1985, 3 518 57702 6
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... 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 ...

Mere Life or More Life?

Glen Newey: Bad Arguments, 14 July 2011

Great Books, Bad Arguments: ‘Republic’, ‘Leviathan’ and ‘The Communist Manifesto’ 
by W.G. Runciman.
Princeton, 127 pp., £13.95, March 2010, 978 0 691 14476 4
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Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy 
by Bonnie Honig.
Princeton, 197 pp., £15.95, August 2011, 978 0 691 15259 2
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... 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 ...

Eminent Athenians

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 1 October 1981

The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain 
by Frank Turner.
Yale, 461 pp., £18.90, April 1981, 0 300 02480 0
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... 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 ...

Locke rules

Ian Hacking, 21 November 1991

Locke. Vol. I: Epistemology 
by Michael Ayers.
Routledge, 341 pp., £90, September 1991, 0 415 06406 6
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Locke. Vol. II: Ontology 
by Michael Ayers.
Routledge, 341 pp., £90, September 1991, 0 415 06407 4
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... 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 ...

Bottom

Richard Jenkyns: George Grote’s ‘A History of Greece’, 9 August 2001

A History of Greece: From the Time of Solon to 403 BC 
by George Grote, edited by J.M. Mitchell and M.O.B. Caspari.
Routledge, 978 pp., £60, September 2000, 0 415 22369 5
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... 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 ...

Two Poems

Ronald Gaskell, 18 April 1985

... 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 ...

Public Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre, 18 February 1982

Explaining America: The ‘Federalist’ 
by Garry Wills.
Athlone, 286 pp., £14.50, August 1981, 0 485 30003 6
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James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition 
by David Hoeveler.
Princeton, 374 pp., £13.70, June 1981, 0 691 04670 0
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... 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 ...

Rabelais’s Box

Peter Burke, 3 April 1980

Rabelais 
by M.A. Screech.
Duckworth, 494 pp., £35, November 1979, 9780715609705
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... 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 ...

Spiv v. Gentleman

Jonathan Barnes: Bickering souls in Ancient Greece and China, 23 October 2003

The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece 
by Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin.
Yale, 348 pp., £25, February 2003, 0 300 09297 0
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... 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 ...

Diary

Victor Sage: On Lorna Sage, 7 June 2001

... 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 ...

Defence of poetry

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 3 July 1980

Enemies of Poetry 
by W.B. Stanford.
Routledge, 181 pp., £8.95, February 1980, 0 7100 0460 5
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The Idea of a Theatre: the Greek Experience 
by M.I. Finley.
British Museum, 16 pp., £95, February 1980, 0 7141 1267 4
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... 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 ...

His Eyes, Her Voice

Ange Mlinko: ‘Greek Lessons’, 10 August 2023

Greek Lessons 
by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won.
Hamish Hamilton, 146 pp., £16.99, April, 978 0 241 60027 6
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... 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 ...

Y2K = AP2583

Jonathan Rée: 17th-century philosophy, 10 June 1999

The Cambridge History of 17th-Century Philosophy 
edited by Daniel Garber and Michael Ayres.
Cambridge, 1616 pp., £90, April 1998, 0 521 58864 2
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... 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 ...

Arctic Habits

Tony Tanner, 25 May 1995

Emerson: The Mind on Fire 
by Robert Richardson.
California, 668 pp., £27, June 1995, 0 520 08808 5
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... Of course, some of the reading is important: Emerson’s struggle with Hume; his discovery of Plato (though ‘Emerson found Plato the way Schliemann found Troy’ strikes me as a comically portentous way of putting it); the effect of Rousseau; the crucial influence of Carlyle; the inspiration of Goethe; his attraction ...

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