“... any claim to truth.’ Does he mean that the more poetic the poetry, the more it lies? Though Plato and Tolstoy held something like this view, it is hard to see how a literary critic can share it. The claim of ‘phonocentricity’ is based on analyses of a few distinctly minor early poems, which are then treated as though they were not significantly ...”

“... Alamos was ‘the most exclusive club in the world’, a place where the ‘spirit of Athens, of Plato, of an ideal republic’ prevailed. Oppenheimer, Tuck said, was the source of this spirit. Hans Bethe said that Oppenheimer ‘worked at physics mainly because he found physics the best way to do philosophy.’ Only his sort of vision could prepare the ...”

“... Jesus, who studied the political cunning of Moses, picked up a few half-understood sentences from Plato and other Greek philosophers, and then surrounded himself with a troupe of voluble imbeciles who were prepared to believe everything he said, even when he claimed that his mother was a virgin and his father a holy ghost. The third of the masters of sacred ...”

“... not so far off. In all three books, Derrida’s argument was that Western thought from Plato to Rousseau to Lévi-Strauss had been hopelessly entangled in the illusion that language might provide us with access to a reality beyond language, beyond metaphor: an unmediated experience of truth and being which he called ‘presence’. Even ...”

“... Darwin does not show that the conception of knowledge which Russell shared with Locke and with Plato – knowledge as something more than ‘the removal of doubt’, more than knowing how to go on – is wrong, and that the one which Dewey shared with the later Wittgenstein is right. On a Deweyan view, ‘getting the nature of knowledge right’ is the ...”

“... The lack of a simple word analogous to ‘fiction’ in Greek was probably one reason Plato was so uneasy about poets, and the lies they supposedly tell about the gods.The distinction between fiction and lies seems more or less self-evident now. In the words of Bernard Williams, a lie is ‘an assertion, the content of which the speaker believes ...”

“... Finnegans Wake and Moby-Dick; Tom McCarthy in his new introduction invokes Döblin, Laforgue, Plato, Shakespeare, Derrida, Bataille and Adorno. Sensibly neither makes reference to Gide’s The Counterfeiters, published in 1925, whose handling of the themes of originality and authenticity has a vitality and a reflexiveness that makes The Recognitions seem ...”

“... his positing of Byzantium (‘a little before Justinian opened St Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato’) as a resolving point of contact between late classical, rational Europe and the expanding religions of the Middle East, puts him into our moment. Roy Foster deserves the highest praise for exposing the historical conditions that freed Yeats to become ...”

“... which is, as it happens, peculiarly expressive of Lowell, and which is identified, for readers of Plato, and again in modern times for readers of Derrida, with the ancient Greek word pharmakon, a drug. The word could mean both a poison and a cure. And this is what drugs were for Lowell. They braked his euphorias, but demeaned him, tamed him with ...”

“... and Ideas’. To describe the Novel in terms of its relationship with the newspaper is like making Plato define Love as the product of Poverty: what he actually called it was ‘the child of Poverty and Plenty’. A ‘functional’ definition of the origins of the Novel leaves out its fructifying or enriching element. It derives, not only from a new world of ...”

“... it. As a consequence, the means of the spiritual struggle against libido do not consist, as with Plato, in turning our eyes upwards and memorising the reality we have previously known and forgotten. The spiritual struggle consists, on the contrary, in turning our eyes continuously downwards or inwards in order to decipher, among the movements of the ...”

“... could 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 ...”

“... view of music as mannerism and good manners achieves its fullest expression. References to Plato, Diderot and Schiller lend the discussion an air of proper intellectual depth as Brendel sets out his understanding of musical jokes against various definitions of humour. Jokes are ‘breaches of order’ within ‘a framework of order’, laughter ...”

“... and Knowledge, published in 1969, said the worry was old, she meant it went back at least to Plato. When Stathis Gourgouris says it is old, in a book called Does Literature Think? published earlier this year,1 he means the same thing: The idea that literature might harbour its own mode of knowledge is ancient, at least as old as the so-called quarrel ...”

“... Strauss the remedy to Hobbes’s defiled naturalism lay intact in the ancient wisdom set forth by Plato, for Oakeshott the incoherence of Hobbes’s naturalistic doctrine of will was only to be overcome in the modern reunion of reason and volition in Hegel and Bosanquet – even if their synthesis remained to be completed. In 1938 Strauss moved to the United ...”