“... love fantasies follow a predictable pattern. Each chapter begins with some combination of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero or Augustine. As we might expect from a medieval historian, she then looks at texts from early Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before ...”

“... composition: but would the large-scale design of the Iliad have been possible 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary. Of this nature, are the Republic of Plato and the Utopia of Sir Thomas More.’ However, for More this would have been less a judgment on the importance of his humanist thought-experiment than on the incorrigible pride of sinful humanity. Hume’s own ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ (1752) was ...”

“... earliest – propounding of the rule that finders may not be keepers is at the start of Book XI of Plato’s Laws, a work which discusses, in relentless detail, the laws that should govern an imaginary new colony to be founded on Crete. Under the general principle ‘Thou shalt not touch or move my possessions without my consent,’ ...”

“... journalists should be jailed for espionage. ‘These terrorists do not spring from the soil like Plato’s guardians,’ he told them. ‘No, they require financing.’ Writing from Baghdad, he seemed to be showing off for Professor Mansfield. I was at Harvard with Cotton, I read my Plato too, and I can tell a Socrates ...”

“... of a sympathetic aunt, she was sent to Clifton Girls’ School in Bristol, where she discovered Plato in translation in the school library. In 1925 she won a place to read English at St Hugh’s. But Oxford was not the liberation she had imagined. Following a scandal, most of the college staff had resigned, and the rump was unimpressive and mainly concerned ...”

“... which he repeatedly expresses as Ravelstein’s fascination with Athens and Jerusalem, as if Plato and the Talmud were equal treasures from the bran tub of antiquity. That of course was the ad hoc conclusion of the autodidact and omnivore Augie March, Bellow’s most superbly rendered fictional creation. March passes long stretches on the periphery of ...”

“... but late in the fourth century. That was when Speusippus and Xenocrates, the dominant figures in Plato’s Academy, sought to devise ancient authority for certain aspects of their late master’s philosophy. Theirs was a conscious construction whereby Pythagoras became the apostle of mathematics and a highly mathematising philosophy, full of anticipations of ...”

“... had been. Late Collingwood was a passionate advocate of home-schooling, and believed that one of Plato’s biggest crimes was to have ‘planted on the European world the crazy idea that education ought to be professionalised.’ Apart from the Autobiography, with its sometimes tactless, sometimes engaging assertions of the relevance of philosophy to modern ...”

“... Heidegger (in a sub-entry on Sein und Zeit). In the index, Aristotle has 153 mentions, Kant 133, Plato 105, Descartes and Hegel 70, Aquinas 53 and Hume 52. Heidegger ties with Plato at 105. These statistics, though crude, tell us something. It’s generally acknowledged that Heidegger is central to the whole relation of ...”

“... to be called by the name of Zeus’. Greek philosophy developed out of this kind of criticism. Plato rejected traditional Greek polytheism and devoted long sections of the Republic to attacking the gods of Homer and Hesiod. He was by no means an atheist – for both Christians and Muslims, elaborating on Plato became an ...”

“... its logicality, absurd. In Beyond Richards considers a sequence of texts: Homer, the Book of Job, Plato, Dante, Shelley, essentially religious in their bearing. Its governing impulse is in its concern with ‘the Scripture over us’, the texts that adumbrate the other, the ideal and the possibility of survival beyond death – a topic which is also ...”

“... the term ‘scientism’, but more important it excludes almost all of philosophical thought from Plato to the present. Can Putnam really mean this? Does he believe that traditional ontology and epistemology are tarred with the scientistic brush? Is Frege’s work included? What about Russell’s? Or Strawson’s, or Davidson’s or Kripke’s or ...”