“... Think of ancient Egyptian art, with its extreme conservatism and conventionalism, prompting Plato to remark, admittedly with some exaggeration, that it had remained unchanged for ten thousand years. Novelty and originality were simply not merits in the Egyptian aesthetic and it was just such austere conservatism that ...”

“... The history of philosophy can be cause for dismay. We are, after all, still asking questions Plato asked 2500 years ago. What is knowledge? What is justice? What is a name? In the ‘linguistic turn’ of the mid-20th century, such inquiries were interpreted as calling for investigation of the meanings of ...”

“... nature of our obligation to obey the Moral Law. Kant’s way of developing this analogy was, like Plato’s, to develop an explicitly anti-naturalistic theory about our noumenal, non-empirical, non-biological selves. Since Darwin, moral philosophers have had to work hard to reconcile Kant’s sense of absolute, unconditional obligation to categorical moral ...”

“... The ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry which Plato described, and in which he took part, is still being fought. Poetry today has become, more generally, ‘rhetoric’, ‘fiction’, ‘literature’, ‘literariness’, ‘narrative’ or ‘writing’. It has even found an ally within the enemy’s ranks – the recent anti-philosophical philosophy sometimes known as the New Pragmatism ...”

“... that he first strayed from Christianity, or perhaps as a student excited by the philosophy of Plato and its later elaborations. Julian was later to claim that he had faked his Christianity long after he chose to seek spiritual fulfilment in the worship of the old Greek and Roman gods. Certainly, in his undergraduate days he liked to think of himself as a ...”

“... surveillance and control. Notice how our authors have done a remarkable job of recasting Plato. Plato forecast that as his ideal Republic degenerated it would pass through oligarchy to democracy, which in turn would succumb to tyranny. Herrnstein and Murray also begin with their near ideal, the Republic after the ...”

“... than they may look at first glance. According to J.S. McClelland in The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti, ‘crowds’ have served a complex, shifting but generally reactionary function across much of the Western tradition of political thought. There has been, he suggests, an immemorial moral panic about numbers and about the union of the ...”

“... was liable at any moment to produce further fantastic beasts including, ultimately, the Athenians. Plato indeed thinks his fellow citizens should be particularly proud of Attic soil because ‘at a time when the whole earth was sprouting, creating diverse animals, wild and tame, she, our mother, was free and pure from savage monsters, and out of all animals ...”

“... mendicant priests and charlatans’ who purported to cure disease by supernatural methods. In Plato’s dialogue, the pious Euthyphro complains that ‘when I say anything in the Assembly about things divine and predict the future to them, they laugh at me as though I were mad.’ No wonder, then, if Plato himself ...”

“... and attempt to classify biology systematically, in all its grandeur and myriad forms. After Plato died in 348 bc, Aristotle left Athens for western Anatolia and took to the field, grounding his subsequent biological studies in deductions based on observation. In the Physics, he had maintained that the principles of change were teleological, that all ...”

“... that he was a champion of ‘liberal ideas’. A cursory look at the history of philosophy from Plato to Heidegger shows that the philosophers of the past were rarely liberals. Ibn Rushd sits squarely in the Platonic camp: he considered the Republic the authoritative text on political philosophy, wrote a commentary on it, and advocated a benevolent ...”

“... in the manner of Socrates or of Sartre? Or should they adopt an aloof and distanced posture, like Plato after his early political disappointments, who views concern with this-worldly affairs as (at best) a conscientious return from the heights to ‘the cave’? Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are surely the two most distinguished political philosophers of ...”

“... that he was a spellbinder, not at all shy about being Welsh. In his later writings he depends upon Plato rather than science yet unborn, but even there a reader could hardly guess that he had this extra power. Nor was he above calculating his effects. When he visited Peking after the Communist victory, he required among other props a folding card-table at the ...”

“... of the ivory towers. One can have doubts: Realist and Nominalist go back to Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle. And they are, we are reminded, still about today. Fifteenth and early 16th-century universities are examples of these divisions: are the ‘masters’ of these same universities always contributory causes of what came later? Their successors ...”

“... civil rights and ready divorce, there is Old and New Comedy. (Actually, to begin with, there is Plato, suggesting in the Symposium that philosophy has its source in sexual attraction. Cavell’s multi-track conversation defies any straight transcription.) In Old Comedy, the emphasis is on the young woman. It is she who holds the plot and whose ‘death and ...”