“... argument of the sort Scarry offers to connect beauty and justice can possibly succeed. Plato was willing to say that only some people – the few philosophers among us – can discern real beauty, and that only they are just. Scarry draws no such distinctions; she takes beauty at face value, and doesn’t think that only superior minds or souls can ...”

“... Anthony Rudolf, a frequent recipient, offers a witty version of a Greek epigram once attributed to Plato. The original was addressed to a boy called Aster (i.e. ‘star’); Moore’s version is date-stamped 26 January 1970, the year the Beatles broke up: You gaze up in the night sky, Ringo, having chosen yourself to be one of the Starrs, And I only wish that ...”

“... for the truth? Surely they always knew that Westerns were a fiction, and loved them as a fiction. Plato knew that the hierarchy of gold, silver, bronze and iron souls recounted in the Republic was a fiction, and though he may not have wanted the people to know, surely they would have. They may still have accepted the myth, but as an allegorical rather than a ...”

“... he invoked the memory of Eurycles, who features not only in Aristophanes’ Wasps but also in Plato’s Sophist, where he is described as one of those characters who live like ‘an enemy in their own house, carrying a voice within their bellies to contradict them wherever they go’. Proper historians may well look askance at such vast and tenuous ...”

“... through folios because she was forbidden to scamper on the grass. She wrestled with Aeschylus and Plato because it was out of the question that she should argue about politics with live men and women.’ That this echoes a letter from Wimpole Street does not make it the whole truth. Greek tragedy introduced Barrett to all manner of behaviour ...”

“... krakens – and impossible objects: you find rings that make the wearer invisible as far back as Plato.What is​ fantasy for? You do not suddenly start needing philosophy on your eighteenth birthday: you have always needed it. Fantasy is philosophy’s more gorgeously painted cousin. You can’t just tell a child a blunt fact about the human heart and ...”

“... an ill wind’; ‘It’s all under one Mykonos.’ I imagine sitting in on one of the dialogues Plato imagined and stumping his Socrates with my critique: ‘What you say is perfectly true, dear friend, but aren’t you putting “all under one Mykonos”?’ The others are silenced by my uncontainable wisdom, end of debate, much nodding then sighing and ...”

“... it practises is a form of hinting – words to get us back to bodies. Hence the importance (as Plato says) of having been trained in some 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 ...”

“... Philosophy will characteristically portray the strangeness of our ordinary lives – Plato of our cave of compliance, Thoreau of our cage of woods (even after putting a certain distance between ourselves and the phantasmic self-mortifications of neighbours), Wittgenstein of our resemblance to a trapped fly, or to one stranded on a field of ...”

“... for its own sake and inspiring students to a life of inquiry; the Sophists (so despised by Plato) who aimed to impart skills useful for worldly public action; and the Baconian vision of a state-sponsored research institute devoted to producing the sort of knowledge that would extend man’s dominion over nature and augment the power of the state. MIT ...”

“... synaptic encounter by rendering it hormonal.In an epilogue to The Reckless Mind Lilla writes about Plato’s failed attempts to check the tyrannical impulses of the ruler of Syracuse, Dionysius, who had philosophical aspirations. Plato warned that the souls of weak-minded intellectuals are prey to the lure of eros, a ...”

“... and of moral right and wrong to the making of expedient speeches and the passing of laws for what Plato would later call the ‘advantage of the stronger’, rather than justice in any ethical sense. The play carefully sidesteps the question of how daughters like Iphigenia will in future be protected from their fathers, or mothers like Clytemnestra from their ...”

“... to be unlike the persona she projected. Yes, she is a companion with whom to discuss Freud and Plato, but she also wants and fails to change the terms of their relationship (‘What you referred to would have a beginning, a middle and an end’), stays in hotels with Murdoch, requires apologies (‘I am sorry about what appears to you in effect as my ...”

“... one citizen of the New World fit to have his name uttered in the same breath with that of Plato’. Even with this kind of support, however, his status among ‘intellectuals’, academic and other, is in no sense settled. During this decade alone he has been roughly treated by, among others, G. Bartlett Giamatti, in an address given while he was ...”

“... in this way represents the reversal of a familiar Platonic structure. For the Platonic spirit (Plato himself, needless to say, had more complex views), the aim is ultimate truth or rationality, and the powers that could lead us to it merely need to be protected from interference by persuasion. The present picture is rather of a world in which everything ...”