“... the boundaries of human experience. There were exceptions, however: especially, there was Plato with his bold view of the Good as a real transcendent form, not a mere thought or poem or dream. Plato’s sovereign Good was neither subject nor object: it belonged to the realm of the il y a – the ‘there is’ or ...”

“... to Homer, Sappho is believed to have lived on the Greek island of Lesbos some time around 600 BC. Plato and Aristophanes mention her; in ancient Rome, Horace and Catullus wrote famous imitations of her verses. Some six hundred years after her death, her renown was such that there was an attempt at a collected edition of her songs: a group of Greek scholars at ...”

“... have been often given, we can reject such views.Consider next a quite different view. According to Plato, Plotinus and others, the Universe exists because its existence is good. Even if we are confident that we should reject this view, it is worth asking whether it makes sense. If it does, that may suggest other possibilities.This Axiarchic View can take a ...”

“... for our times.’ ‘Ubik is true,’ Dick told Williams, ‘and we’re in a sort of cave, like Plato said, and they’re showing us endless funky films.’ The funky parts of modern life – films, pills, joints, urban confusion, free love, SF itself – which promised to reveal a better reality instead turned out to be part of the veil. Like America, Dick ...”

“... When it comes to the transmission of elite status from one generation to the next, Shakespeare or Plato no longer has the same cachet as economics or physics.Moral​ panics about ‘political correctness’ date back to the 1970s and early 1980s, when there was no mandated national curriculum, and conservatives could entertain paranoid fantasies of ‘loony ...”

“... 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 ...”