“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”