“... Plato (as philosopher, not rhetorician) here murmurs: ‘I told you so.’ Vickers shares Sir Karl Popper’s well-known distaste for the ‘lordly lie’ by which the inhabitants of Plato’s Republic are persuaded to cooperate with the eugenic policies of the élite. He objects, that is, both to the end and to the means. But the means ...”

“... told Salmagundi:In 1933 Mr [H.A.L.] Fisher, the Warden of New College, asked me to write a book on Karl Marx for the Home University Library. I said: ‘What is the audience for the book?’ He said: ‘Squash professionals.’ I had never read a line of Marx ...One sees the famous charm at work. But not even a line, by 1933, even after St ...”

“... with Dick Crossman’s Thirties Plato Today, where Plato appears as the first fascist, or with Karl Popper’s postwar assault, The Open Society and its Enemies, which accuses Plato of racism, totalitarianism, and a fair cross-section of the sins of Hegel and Marx. Where Stone is unusual is in making Socrates as big a villain as his disciple ...”

“... allows contingency a crucial role. While building on the insights of predecessors like Bury, Popper or W.B. Gallie, Ferguson reformulates the essential arguments with a characteristically late 20th-century appeal to chaos theory in reconciling causation and contingency. ‘Chaos – stochastic behaviour in deterministic systems – means unpredictable ...”

“... in determining the cultural consciousness of 18th-century society will have obvious echoes of Karl Marx. But, just as Popper pointed out that while Beethoven was affected by such social developments as the enlargement of the orchestra, no theory of metaphysical or materialist determinism could explain a single bar of ...”

“... and sociological idea of science – a mode of inquiry, a methodological icon. He had first read Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies in 1946 and Hall describes it as ‘the book which was to influence him more than any other’. It is noticeable that Gellner did not seem to relativise science in the way that Weber had relativised the pervasive process of ...”

“... and purported inevitability characteristic of the genre, and condemned by liberals such as Popper and Berlin. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit was published in 1966, and has been much discussed in Germany, though not much elsewhere. Badly-educated English-speaking philosophers like myself (the kind who read long books in German only if they absolutely have ...”