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After the Deluge

Peter Campbell: How Rainbows Work, 25 April 2002

The Rainbow Bridge: Rainbows in Art, Myth and Science 
by Raymond Lee and Alistair Fraser.
Pennsylvania State, 394 pp., £54.95, June 2001, 0 271 01977 8
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... 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 ...

Bit by bit

David Lindley, 7 November 1991

The Triumph of the Embryo 
by Lewis Wolpert.
Oxford, 211 pp., £14.95, September 1991, 0 19 854243 7
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... 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 ...

Cave’s Plato

A.D. Nuttall, 7 July 1988

In Defence of Rhetoric 
by Brian Vickers.
Oxford, 508 pp., £40, February 1988, 0 19 812837 1
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Recognitions: A Study in Poetics 
by Terence Cave.
Oxford, 530 pp., £40, March 1988, 0 19 815849 1
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... 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 ...

Rock Bottom

Thomas Nagel: Legislation, 14 October 1999

The Dignity of Legislation 
by Jeremy Waldron.
Cambridge, 210 pp., £35, July 1999, 0 521 65092 5
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... 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 ...

Hellenic Tours

Jonathan Barnes, 1 August 1985

The Cambridge History of Classical Literature. Vol. I: Greek Literature 
edited by P.E. Easterling and B.M.W. Knox.
Cambridge, 936 pp., £47.50, May 1985, 0 521 21042 9
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A History of Greek Literature 
by Peter Levi.
Viking, 511 pp., £14.95, February 1985, 0 670 80100 3
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... 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 ...

Transference

Brigid Brophy, 15 April 1982

Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession 
by Janet Malcolm.
Picador, 174 pp., £1.95, February 1982, 9780330267373
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Psychoanalytic Psychology of Normal Development 
by Anna Freud.
Hogarth, 389 pp., £15, February 1982, 0 7012 0543 1
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Record of a Friendship: The Correspondence of Wilhelm Reich and A.S. Neill 
edited by Beverley Placzek.
Gollancz, 429 pp., £12.50, January 1982, 0 575 03054 2
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... 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 ...

Sensitivity isn’t enough

Peter Berkowitz: The theory of toleration, 7 September 2000

Virtue, Reason and Toleration: The Place of Toleration in Ethical and Political Philosophy 
by Glen Newey.
Edinburgh, 208 pp., £50, November 1999, 0 7486 1244 0
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... 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 ...

By the Dog

M.F. Burnyeat: How Plato Works, 7 August 2003

The Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues 
by Ruby Blondell.
Cambridge, 452 pp., £55, June 2002, 0 521 79300 9
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... 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 ...

Ailments of the Tongue

Barbara Newman: Medieval Grammar, 22 March 2012

Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 
edited by Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter.
Oxford, 972 pp., £35, May 2012, 978 0 19 965378 2
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... 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 ...

Seven Centuries Too Late

Barbara Newman: Popes in Hell, 15 July 2021

Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy 
by Guy Raffa.
Harvard, 370 pp., £28.95, May 2020, 978 0 674 98083 9
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Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante 
by David Bowe.
Oxford, 225 pp., £60, November 2020, 978 0 19 884957 5
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Dante’s Christian Ethics: Purgatory and Its Moral Contexts 
by George Corbett.
Cambridge, 233 pp., £75, March 2020, 978 1 108 48941 6
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Why Dante Matters: An Intelligent Person’s Guide 
by John Took.
Bloomsbury, 207 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 4729 5103 8
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Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Literature, Doctrine, Reality 
by Zygmunt Barański.
Legenda, 658 pp., £75, February 2020, 978 1 78188 879 7
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... 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 ...

How Shall We Repaint the Kitchen?

Ian Hacking: The Colour Red, 1 November 2007

Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind 
by G.E.R. Lloyd.
Oxford, 201 pp., £27.50, April 2007, 978 0 19 921461 7
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... 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 ...

Writing it down

Peter Parsons, 31 August 1989

Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens 
by Rosalind Thomas.
Cambridge, 321 pp., £27.50, March 1989, 0 521 35025 5
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... 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 ...

Modernity

Bernard Williams, 5 January 1989

Whose justice? Which rationality? 
by Alasdair MacIntyre.
Duckworth, 410 pp., £35, March 1988, 9780715621981
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... 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 ...

Scientific Fraud

Peter Medawar, 17 November 1983

Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science 
by William Broad and Nicholas Wade.
Century, 256 pp., £8.95, July 1983, 0 7126 0243 7
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... 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 ...

Rights

John Dunn, 2 October 1980

Natural Rights Theories 
by Richard Tuck.
Cambridge, 192 pp., £10.50, December 1979, 0 521 22512 4
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Natural Law and Natural Rights 
by John Finnis.
Oxford, 425 pp., £15, February 1980, 0 19 876110 4
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A Discourse on Property 
by James Tully.
Cambridge, 208 pp., £10.50, July 1980, 0 521 22830 1
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... and Oxford analytical jurisprudence, with handsome though far from uncritical acknowledgments to Aristotle and Aquinas, alongside Herbert Hart and Joseph Raz, it combines great historical and analytical sophistication and care with an engaging innocence of viewpoint. What it seeks to show is how to understand the place of law in human life. The viewpoint ...

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