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“... a gracious youth’, and is visited by Sophocles, ‘a handsome old man’. He dreams of Plato standing at the end of his bed composing one of his letters. The philosopher is furious: ‘He glanced at me and said: “Is this what you think appropriate for me, letter-writing?” ’ This nostalgia seems to have had consequences also for ...”

“... That Plato was by nature a short-story writer, not a novelist, seems clear. Walt Whitman was a novelist, Chopin a writer of short stories. Michelangelo was a novelist, Picasso a writer of short stories. Whatever the medium, most artists would seem to favour a breathing period that is either long or short. Chekhov, Borges, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver were short-story writers ...”

“... In the Republic, Socrates and Plato’s brothers wander out of Athens and walk down to the port of Piraeus, leaving the city behind them. After quickly demolishing the prevailing views of justice in Athenian society, Socrates proceeds to dream of another city, a just city governed by philosophers whose souls would be oriented towards the Good ...”

“... freed him from the self-consciousness that constrained later philosophers. Unlike uptight Plato and obsessive Aristotle, whom Nietzsche dismissed as having survived accidentally, Anaximander was a free thinker, voyaging through new constellations of thought. He was far from straightforward, though: his surviving work was an ‘enigmatic ...”

“... traditions, which supposed, on the one hand, that no one could properly understand a text of Plato until he had mastered Denniston’s Greek Particles, and on the other, that the kind of general knowledge of Plato that a non-Classicist might need could be taken for granted. It is one of the ironies of the current ...”

“... to follow. If we were to discover that despite his exaltation of the rational part of the soul, Plato spent his days getting drunk and ogling young boys in the gymnasion, what would we think of the moral philosophy he puts in Socrates’ mouth? Still, simply noting the presence of hypocrisy doesn’t answer the question of whether hypocrisy matters, or when ...”

“... counts the troops, and Canon Law rides haughtily in 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 ...”

“... arms back into shoulder sockets). Yet the man himself is known only from scattered remarks by Plato and later authors. A vast body of writings goes under his name but, in almost every case, the texts date from a later era. The Hippocratic corpus includes between 51 and 72 prose treatises (depending on which edition you consult) dealing with a welter of ...”

“... see a Coloured mayor in Cape Town, ‘the mother city’, replacing another Coloured mayor, Dan Plato. The Coloureds were responsible for one of the most important creole languages, Afrikaans, and they point the way to a creole future, here in South Africa and probably elsewhere ...”

“... appealing because vulnerable – which might be called daylight mysticism. It is a pudding of Plato, Kant and Weil. Looking around her, she feels summoned to a belief that ‘philosophers must try to invent a terminology which shows that our natural psychology can be altered by conceptions which lie beyond its range ... the Platonic metaphor of the Good ...”

“... relativisms are endangering all that we hold dear reject most of Nietzsche’s criticisms of Plato and Kant. Williams endorses most of them. There were few kind words for Plato in Shame and Necessity, Williams’s admirably iconoclastic study of ancient Greek ideas about moral virtue – a book filled with echoes of ...”

“... End of London. He seems to have been a docile student, happy to be guided through the works of Plato and Aristotle in the original Greek, and if he ran into problems – not unlikely for a solitary 16-year-old Presbyterian from Glasgow – he didn’t mention them. (This experiment in autobiography was, like all MacIntyre’s work, lucid, clever and ...”

“... Political Theory, which was usually taught by a European scholar and whose range extended from Plato to Marx, but included no Americans. The second factor is that Americans are not naturally given to grand theory. A glance across the social sciences and humanities for the ‘great theorists’ of the past century makes this abundantly clear, whether in ...”

“... and ideal image of a ‘pure’, ‘perfect’ and ‘intellectual’ love between men, ‘such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare’, an image which was greeted with immediate and enthusiastic applause by the audience. It is the archaeology of this apologia and the applause it ...”

“... It was too late for her to catch up on the Latin and Greek she had missed, but she began to read Plato in translation; then, it seems, life began to make some kind of sense. When she went up to Oxford to read English, Auden was at Christ Church, and Waugh had just left Hertford. Renault’s Oxford might have been on another planet. Five years before her ...”