“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... expressed in conversation, letters, printed essays or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.’ It was intended, Jefferson goes on, ‘to place before mankind the common sense of the subject ...’ In the one paragraph which he devotes to this letter, Wills notes the main point that it makes without noticing the ...”

“... times in which it must have been heaven to be alive. Histories of animal classification begin with Aristotle but quickly skip to Linnaeus. His Systema Naturae, published in 1735, classified plants on the basis of their sexual parts. Linnaeus’s ambitions later expanded to encompass both plants and animals – by convention, modern zoological nomenclature ...”

“... but it was also clear that there were things in the natural world which were not to be found in Aristotle, Galen or Discorides. ‘Apart from their strong personal affinity nothing joined Cesi to Galileo as closely as Cesi’s ever more strongly held conviction that Aristotle and the whole Peripatetic school could no ...”

“... where no such principle applied, was weakened wherever interest-bearing debt was widely used. When Aristotle dismissed interest in Politics – he called it the unnatural ‘birth of money from money’ – he wrote as a conservative critic of what was already a common practice in fourth-century Athens, where older economic notions of kinship were receding. In ...”

“... and religious traditions were, in fact, one. He would show the secret concord between Aristotle and Plato, long debated but never demonstrated; and he would go further, to show that these ancient philosophies shared essential truths with the Kabbalah and Christian scripture. He read everybody – the Christian theologians of the Middle Ages, the ...”

“... Airways’ morning flight to Malaga may like to be reminded that for the purposes of fiction Aristotle recommends a convincing impossibility in preference to an unconvincing possibility (say, a libidinous encounter with a carton of cream). Convincing impossibilities abound in Pious Secrets, a quirkily imaginative, witty, wry, touching book with an ...”

“... predestined as bird flu, there remains the problem of explaining why we should welcome it. Whereas Aristotle saw ethics as a sub-branch of politics, Jameson confuses morality with moralism, a move which then allows him to write it off. His alternative to morality is really historicism: instead of passing absolute judgments on things, we should return them to ...”

“... of Thrasymachus in the Republic and Callicles in the Gorgias. Williams is much less drawn to Aristotle, who he says invented scholasticism and is therefore unique among great philosophers in deserving the more tedious parts of his legacy. But The Sense of the Past offers some fine discussions of Aristotle’s ...”

“... Aristotle affirmed the essential difference between the sexes: men’s brains were bigger, women were more inconstant, emotional and compassionate, at least in part because they do not produce semen – whence men’s and women’s different behaviour and place in the social order. Symbolically, at least, biology’s long, continuing and often lamentable history of using its authority to define woman’s nature, in order to justify attributing her with inferior status, begins here ...”

“... one of this year’s tougher options – is asking for trouble. Marseille has moved on since Aristotle praised it as a stable, fair-to-middling Greek colony run by benign oligarchs: there’s been a brisk trade in drugs for half a century and nowadays dealers in the city can earn 100,000 euros a month, a Marseille cop told the New York Times last ...”

“... be capable of being folded into the other, lending it aspects of the previous vision’s power. Aristotle, in the first account of tragedy to have come down to us, is already wondering about the difference between tragedy and monstrosity. ‘Tragedy,’ he says in a famous passage, ‘is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain ...”

“... speech, writing and gesture. For stimulus in such matters he turned to the standard authors – to Aristotle, Plato, Ammonius Hermaeus and Ficino among them but, equally, to the dense Latin of the legal glossators. Most of the glossators discuss theories of language and meaning. Rabelais follows them in detail. The pharmacokinetics of the ‘Rabelais ...”

“... This is the longest part of the book, and is a series of reminders that the sentence which begins Aristotle’s Metaphysics (‘All men by nature desire to know’) has not always had the sense it has for us. It has not always meant that our curiosity about how things work is an essential and laudable part of us. For the ancients, this phrase implied both ...”