“... frustrated rescue, husband kills wife: high drama or melodrama. This version was already known to Aristotle; you could not, he says sourly in the Poetics, discussing recognition on stage, find a cruder device than the Theban birthmark. It was known also to a vase-painter who worked in South Italy about 340/320 BC; his stately amphora shows named characters in ...”

“... so much of geometry, should have had some insight into the basic structure of the rainbow – Aristotle described it as a reflection which took its arcuate shape from the curved surface of an upturned hemispherical bowl of cloud. Almost every subsequent advance in our understanding of the physics of light and the physiology of sight has made it possible ...”

“... beyond human comprehension, that only proved the necessity of divine intervention. But even from Aristotle’s time there was a semi-scientific debate as to how God accomplished His miracle. Was the embryo a tiny person, a homunculus, that straightforwardly grew into a full-sized human being, or was it rather, as ...”

“... plot mechanisms which a nice intelligence does not care to dwell on. It seems that in the Poetics Aristotle is interested most in the recognition within the play, of one character by another – Orestes by Electra, say. In post-Classical theory anagnorisis is shifted, outside the play, to the spectator or reader. Hegel turns anagnorisis into a species of ...”

“... draws on some classic writers in political theory, not all of whom were convinced democrats – Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke and Kant – and the book is a contribution to the history of political thought as well as to contemporary debate (a historically oriented companion volume to Waldron’s more purely analytic treatment of the same topic in Law and ...”

“... Poetry is better treated than prose – thus Callimachus is allotted more space than Plato, Aristotle gets fewer pages than ‘minor Hellenistic poets’. Unfamiliar prose-writers are largely shunned: Epictetus is briefly discussed, Galen extends to a page, Archimedes, Ptolemy and Hippocrates earn each an aside, Euclid (unless I have missed ...”

“... specific content of the physical sciences. Freud’s was one of the supremely commanding minds. If Aristotle, in the Organon, codified the syntax of rational thought, it was Freud who discovered the syntax of irrational impulses and their often distorting impact on reason. ‘It may rationally be said that every person is mad once in every 24 hours,’ wrote ...”

“... and its coherence and desirability put to the test. In seeking a definition, Newey follows Aristotle, whose advice to those undertaking an ethical inquiry is, as Newey reminds us, to start with the opinions held by ‘the many and the wise’. The task of philosophy, on this view, is to elaborate the implications of what is already reasonably ...”

“... have allies enough to bring about the promised regime change. Plato isn’t alone in these views. Aristotle quite often describes existing politics in Thrasymachean terms, as when he writes: ‘The devices by which oligarchies deceive the people are five in number,’ and proceeds to give details, before turning to the counter-devices found in democracies. He ...”

“... the vanguard. The grammarian Donatus deals Plato a terrible blow ‘with a feathered verse’, but Aristotle stands ‘firm as a castle on a hill’ for all that Horace, Homer and Virgil can do. In the end Logic tries to arrange a truce, but the effort fails dismally because her messenger, having fatally neglected the study of grammar, cannot speak plainly and ...”

“... a new and distinct brand of rationally rigorous “severe” Philosophia whose supreme auctor was Aristotle’. Theories that Dante flirted with heresy in these studies are baseless. Yet, in a searing moment near the end of the Purgatorio, he seems to repudiate the Convivio even more thoroughly than that book repudiated any hint of an affair with the donna ...”

“... us, Leibniz said of Locke, are matters of some importance; he referred to Plato the good guy and Aristotle, not so good. Many of the nature/nurture arguments seem also to recapitulate the scholastic Christian and Muslim problem of determinism/freedom. Cognition v. culture is where we have got to after debates in the West spanning millennia. Benjamin Lee ...”

“... without writing? Plato’s arguments show the picturesque plausibilities of conversation: could Aristotle have invented logic without writing? Writing disseminates information and encourages argument: oral society is a society of rote-learning. The Athenians themselves agreed that written law is central to democracy: for unwritten law is the property of the ...”

“... MacIntyre sees as three different traditions of Western ethical thought: one running from Homer to Aristotle and passing through Arab and Jewish writers to St Thomas Aquinas; another, Biblical, tradition that came to Aquinas from St Augustine; and a third that informed Scottish thought in the 17th and 18th centuries. The studies of these various traditions ...”

“... but so they were, many of them. They were telling stories, and wanted to tell good stories. Aristotle’s conception of poetic truth was one in which correspondence with reality played little part, and his biology gave an account of what he thought ought to be true in the light of his deep conception of the true purposes of nature. Thus it ought to be ...”