“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... friend and tutorial partner at the court of Philip II in Macedonia, where they were taught by Aristotle. In 331 bce, after Alexander’s conquest of Egypt, he and Ptolemy travelled across the desert to the oracle at the Siwa Oasis, who proclaimed Alexander the son of Amun, the Egyptian king of the gods. Over the next decade, Ptolemy fought beside ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... What I overheard Bloom say was this: ‘Well, you know that the ancient Greeks, even Plato and Aristotle, had no concept of “power” as we know it today.’ It had never occurred to me that the two philosophical masters, whom we were always told to revere as the founders of Western thought, had no idea of power in their heads. I rushed to the library to ...”

“... and able-minded chimpanzees are not by analogy disabled humans – any more than seals are, pace Aristotle, deformed quadrupeds – what, finally, is being served by such mismeasurings of like and unlike? Why not unlike with unlike as the catalyst for an enlarged moral community? Beings who are equal in the moral sense need not be like one another. Or, as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... interest, over ‘the common weal’. Its roots are the ethical ones that had been located by Aristotle and by Cicero: tyranny, the rule of will rather than of law, is the triumph of passion over reason. Just as More’s Hythloday thinks that, under monarchy, reason will always lose out to will and appetite, so Starkey laments that ‘our country has been ...”

“... more – err in the same way as Saint-Just – if they think that the virtues as described by Aristotle or St Thomas are the necessary and sufficient materials of ethical self-understanding at the end of the 20th century. There is another way in which the demands of ethical disagreement as we more ordinarily meet it may seem to call on the theory of the ...”

“... and so objective about history in the way that Praxiteles, say, was objective about human bodies, Aristotle about animals, Hipparchus about the movement of the stars: that the Greeks, uniquely, were not ‘natives’, but famously, peculiarly, engaged with the world as it is, although one might well want to contextualise this ‘Greek Miracle’, a not ...”

“... of elaborated concatenation. It is analogous to the argument about exactness and cogency on which Aristotle is to be believed: ‘It is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness in each kind which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to ...”