“... stories about their characters and curious habits. He moved equably from Thales through Plato and Aristotle, to Zeno, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and eventually Epicurus, but his impartiality probably had less to do with scruples about objectivity than with uncomprehending indifference to philosophical questions, and a terrific appetite for gossip. If Diogenes ...”

“... next two thousand years. Even so, there is some foundation for the traditional story – as old as Aristotle – that speculation about nature was revolutionised by a group of Greeks from the sixth century BC onwards. Although modern historians have qualified Aristotle’s claims, it remains the consensus that a small group ...”

“... little parts as you please, they vanish every one almost at once, in the twinkling of an eye.’ Aristotle’s division of man’s life into periods of growth, stasis and decline is sensible enough, but hardly startling. The common division into four periods, with its foundation on the four basic qualities of hot and cold, dry and moist, relates the ...”

“... Arabic for ‘philosophy’ – was to be a partisan of Ibn Sina. But he didn’t simply interpret Aristotle, he supplanted him, finding new ways to characterise the human soul as immaterial and separate from the body. His ‘flying man’ thought experiment proposed that a person created by God with no memories and no immediate sensory input (hence ...”

“... One key may lie in the nature of Epicurus’ teaching. We are brought up to think of Plato and Aristotle as the fountainheads of two great traditions of philosophical thought; in Coleridge’s words: ‘Every man is born either an Aristotelian or a Platonist ... They are the two classes of men, next to which it is almost impossible to conceive a ...”

“... thinkers too. The odds were long. For centuries, philosophers hammered prejudice into reason. Aristotle’s claim that in women reason was ‘not sovereign’ travelled across the universities of medieval Europe, even though he and other ancient male authorities lived and wrote alongside women who were evidence to the contrary. The ...”

“... gravel,   while you read and plucked these words from a glossary   and I turned blindly to Aristotle prosing   on the kinds of friendship. III That was Healfdene’s Hall,   the House of Housman, the lane of light   where on lines of benches scholars feast   and warriors wait with towels on shield-arms   for the words of ...”

“... in favour of the old (and psychologically more satisfying) geocentric worldview supported by Aristotle. Since his own achievement ensured his subsequent enshrinement as an unquestioned authority, these two cardinal errors were guaranteed an extraordinarily long shelf-life. Finally, the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, which triumphantly ...”

“... in the history of Western philosophy. Over and above the five senses, we can discern, says Aristotle – in whose writings Heller-Roazen first discovers the notion – a kind of governing master sense. Actually, ‘over and above’ is not quite right: we might as easily say that this ‘common sense’ subtends or grounds the others; but this is in ...”

“... a universal generalisation that great advances, and men of supreme acknowledged achievement from Aristotle onwards, inhibit change and achievement beyond their frontiers of understanding by the awe they cast behind them. Pavlov stressed that conditioning could be anticipatory, that the dog may salivate on the expectation rather than the stimulus of bell or ...”

“... does. This approach has a long ancestry. In his discussion of justice in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle mentions something he calls the ‘Lesbian rule’. Students can get excited when this PowerPoint slide comes up but, crushingly, it turns out that Aristotle is thinking not of a body politic subject to correction by ...”

“... curiosities. The two senses that seem to bring us knowledge from afar are vision and hearing (even Aristotle taught that). The boy that was Jonathan Rée began by wondering what it would be like to be blind or deaf, and which would be worse. (Boy’s conclusion: blind, of course.) But then more thoughts. Just how do these two senses, and their ...”

“... belonging to the arena of sex and desire stems in part from a belief in its astonishing fertility. Aristotle suggested in his Historia Animalium that the hare could get pregnant twice: they ‘breed and bear at all seasons, superfoetate (i.e. conceive again) during pregnancy’. Aristotle also suggested, it’s true, that ...”

“... Of the earlier and more substantial literary sources, it all depends on whether you favour Aristotle, Xenophon or Plutarch, all non-Spartans. None focuses on women, but all use them in their analyses of the alleged strengths or weaknesses of the Spartan constitution. Which came first: the inadequate constitution that allowed women to own property, or ...”

“... against the wall. I can dance a jig in the hall. I can sit completely still reading a book about Aristotle. I can do nothing at all. Later on, I sit down to supper with myself, having opened a bottle of wine. I touch my glass to the TV screen in a toast to the BBC. My house is your house, old friend! Stay switched on all the time if you want to. With a glass ...”