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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... words and false. His is an extreme case of what Anne Barton calls cratylism. The word comes from Plato’s dialogue, the Cratylus, which is all about the question of whether language is naturally rooted in reality or is merely arbitrary. Within the dialogue the character called Cratylus maintains the former doctrine, one Hermogenes the latter, while Socrates ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... exposed. This is not to say that new fixed entities are never then proposed to replace the myth. Plato’s divisions of the soul and their reflection in the state, the liberals’ titles rooted in first possession, the Marxists’ resolution of real contradictions, and Moore’s directly intuited Good are only four of the more notorious past instances. But ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in addition to a group of articles on Renaissance art and thought, there is a long early essay on Plato’s philosophy of art, the text of a lecture on the ideas of Aby Warburg and a short piece on the religious art of Rouault and Matisse. Finally, as a companion to the Warburg text, Wind chose to republish his review of E. H. Gombrich’s biography of ...”

“... that a ‘companionate marriage’, like that of Alcestis and Admetus, was anomalous, because Plato in his Symposium likens it to a homosexual partnership, with its bonds not only of intense affection but of mutual defence in war or danger. But again it is not Plato who discusses Alcestis’s decision to die for her ...”

“... 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 ...”