We look at it and see ourselves

Bruce Cumings: Fantasies of Korea, 15 December 2005

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty 
by Bradley Martin.
Dunne, 868 pp., $29.95, October 2004, 0 312 32221 6
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Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea 
by Jasper Becker.
Oxford, 300 pp., £16.99, November 2004, 9780195170443
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... static or indolent East and the dynamic, progressive West goes all the way back to Herodotus and Aristotle. Trotsky, however, made specific reference to Marx’s theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production, which appraised Asia by reference to what it lacked when set against the European model of development: feudalism, the rise of the ...

No Magic, No Metaphor

Fredric Jameson: ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, 15 June 2017

... in the process). Folk wisdom through the ages has – along with many philosophers, beginning with Aristotle – assimilated the state itself to this patriarchal or dynastic family, and it is this deep ideological archetype that One Hundred Years of Solitude brings to the surface and makes visible. The extended family founded by José Arcadio Buendía is the ...

The Pocahontas Exception

Thomas Laqueur: America’s Ancestor Obsession, 30 March 2023

A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in US History 
by Francesca Morgan.
North Carolina, 301 pp., £27.95, October 2021, 978 1 4696 6478 1
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... the decisions that are made about what to include and exclude, what matters and what does not. As Aristotle would have it, that’s politics, and those politics are often not ...

The Soul of Man under Psychoanalysis

Adam Phillips, 29 November 2001

... and which psychoanalysis has not yet analysed.’ Extracting pity and terror in obedience to Aristotle suggests something at once willed and formulaic about Sinclair’s novel. But the allusion to Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism is perhaps more telling. Neither Wilde nor Freud, for quite different reasons, was ever Eliot’s cup of ...

Teaching English in the Far East

William Empson, 17 August 1989

... for many years, and he was now to do it without his notes, and he asked me if I remembered what Aristotle meant by Imitation. I said I was quite sure that he wouldn’t be able to find out if he was sat down in the largest library in the world.I thought the results we were getting by this method were strikingly good. No doubt the chief reason was that the ...

Cambridge English and Beyond

Raymond Williams, 7 July 1983

... move from Greek and Roman drama to Shakespeare. The English Moralists were to be headed by Plato, Aristotle, Paul and Augustine. What was being traced was a genuine ancestry of thought and form, with the linguistic connections assumed from the habits of the private schools. It is not so much this cultural connection that counts: it is the long gap, in the ...

Homer Inc

Edward Luttwak, 23 February 2012

The Iliad by Homer 
translated by Stephen Mitchell.
Weidenfeld, 463 pp., £25, October 2011, 978 0 297 85973 4
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... another member of the Institute, Zhong Mei Chen, who studied Homeric Greek at Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University after a spell at Brigham Young University in Utah, had published poetical new translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Luo Niansheng/Wilson Wong Iliad is on sale online, with a handsome Zeus on the cover, for just 19.60 yuan, or ...

Let them eat oysters

Lorna Finlayson: Animal Ethics, 5 October 2023

Animal Liberation Now 
by Peter Singer.
Penguin, 368 pp., £20, June, 978 1 84792 776 7
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Justice for Animals 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Simon & Schuster, 372 pp., £16, January, 978 1 9821 0250 0
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... this seems a bit thin, that’s part of the intention. Nussbaum’s idea is to marry Aristotle with the later Rawls, whose ‘political liberalism’ argues that the principles on which a state governs should be minimal enough to be acceptable to citizens with differing (but, crucially, ‘reasonable’) views and values. Nussbaum’s theory ...

The Contingency of Selfhood

Richard Rorty, 8 May 1986

... again, Bloom’s ‘horror of finding oneself to be only a copy or replica’. The wonder in which Aristotle believed philosophy to begin was wonder at finding oneself in a world larger, stronger, nobler than oneself. The fear in which Bloom’s poets begin is the fear that one might end one’s days in such a world, a world one never made, an inherited ...

The Darwin Show

Steven Shapin, 7 January 2010

... Better than any idea of Newton’s or Einstein’s, and better than any idea had by Jesus or Aristotle or Hume or that other great 12 February 1809 birthday boy, Abraham Lincoln. It ‘unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law’. If T.H. Huxley was ‘Darwin’s ...

Travelling in the Classic Style

Thomas Laqueur: Primo Levi, 5 September 2002

Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics 
by Robert Gordon.
Oxford, 316 pp., £45, October 2001, 0 19 815963 3
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Primo Levi 
by Ian Thomson.
Hutchinson, 624 pp., £25, March 2002, 0 09 178531 6
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The Double Bond: Primo Levi, a Biography 
by Carole Angier.
Viking, 898 pp., £25, April 2002, 0 670 88333 6
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... notion that ethics is a branch of practical philosophy. Writings about ethics are not, as Aristotle said, ‘undertaken for the sake of understanding . . . or in order to know what goodness is but to become good men’. Literature is important in modern versions of this view because it offers concrete examples of virtuous behaviour and because it ...

Palestinianism

Adam Shatz, 6 May 2021

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said 
by Timothy Brennan.
Bloomsbury, 437 pp., £20, March 2021, 978 1 5266 1465 0
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... wrote what, but rather how a work is written and how it is read. The idea that because Plato and Aristotle are male and the products of a slave society they should be disqualified from receiving contemporary attention is as limited an idea as suggesting that only their work, because it was addressed to and about elites, should be read today. Marginality and ...

What else actually is there?

Jenny Turner: On Gillian Rose, 7 November 2024

Love’s Work 
by Gillian Rose.
Penguin, 112 pp., £9.99, March 2024, 978 0 241 94549 0
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Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory 
by Gillian Rose, edited by Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson.
Verso, 176 pp., £16.99, September 2024, 978 1 80429 011 8
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... I had unfinished business with my mother; I told Gillian I needed time to catch up on Plato and Aristotle, but secretly I had applied for a place at teacher training college in Edinburgh and was planning to spend the rest of my grant there.Even now that I have, unlike Rose, attained the oldish age and physical invisibility she longed for, I still struggle ...