“... attempt to ‘conform in our premises to the appearance of that which exists’. He thought Aristotle was wrong to believe that the universe was eternal, a belief that, if true, ‘destroys the law’, and ‘gives the lie to every miracle’. But, he insisted, if Aristotle’s belief were some day proved, then he too ...”

“... 12th-century Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd, better known in the West as Averroes, a commentator on Aristotle and one of the last representatives of falsafa – the grand philosophical tradition of medieval Islam – in Muslim Spain. In Rushdie’s retelling, Ibn Rushd’s commitment to ‘reason, logic and science’ got him into trouble with the ‘Berber ...”

“... offers nothing less than the makings of a radically new theory of communication, the first since Aristotle’s. From Aristotle to modern semiotics, all thinking about communication has been based on the code model, in which the communicative process is one of encoding and decoding. Recently, Paul Grice and others have ...”

“... of Ayer the number of references to Hume is four times larger than the number of references to Aristotle. If the volume of essays that have been written by pupils and colleagues in honour of Professor G.E.M. Anscombe had had an index, the proportion would have been very different. But this would have been by reason of the attention justly paid to ...”

“... L. Sayers maintained that the essential rules for writing detective stories are laid down by Aristotle in the Poetics. Similarly, Ronald Knox held that, from prooimion to epilogos, such stories ought to be constructed on the model of Greek tragedy. There is something to be said for these learned thoughts. ...”

“... sing them while he shows off his costumed body. He is more like the old Athenian crowd-poets whom Aristotle praised for their command of spectacle and song, pity and terror. ‘Aeschylus tragical on stilts,’ sighed Aldous Huxley. ‘Bawling sublimities through a tortured mouth-hole!’ It is not for his ‘artistic merit’ that I would compare him with ...”

“... the Apollonian view. His survey of the ways in which the Earth has been imagined as a globe, from Aristotle to the Global Information Infrastructure, is a remarkable history of Western ways of seeing and longing. Whatever myths are now spun about Columbus confronting the flat-earthers with his orange (or egg), educated Europeans had known since classical ...”

“... rats’, Anderson calls them. Ogling scenes of horror gives us peculiar pleasure, as Aristotle notes with a kind of puzzlement near the beginning of the Poetics, though he is setting up a distinction between art and reality, saying we like looking at nasty things – at the lowest insects and corpses – when they are represented. (His ...”

“... boiling water on their backs, which, unlike his dietary information, does seem to be true. Aristotle suggested that hedgehogs mate upright on their hind legs, belly to belly, to avoid each other’s spines. In fact, they mate like other four-legged mammals, although the process is more stressful than for most: it’s not unusual for the female to move ...”

“... allegories and staid descriptions of classical gods, as well as brief and racy paraphrases of Aristotle which explain how we think or remember – in itself a skill to be wondered at. Much of the pleasure in reading him comes from the juxtaposition of these elements and the way Henryson keeps us continually recalibrating the relationship between them. He ...”

“... object”,’ Hilary Putnam once observed. One way out of this dilemma is to throw over Plato for Aristotle. There may be no perfect mathematical entities in our world, but there are plenty of imperfect approximations. We can draw crude circles and lines on a chalkboard; we can add two apples to three apples, even if they are not identical, and end up with ...”

“... theology, medicine and alchemy. The most popular text was the Secretum secretorum, supposedly Aristotle’s teachings as passed directly to Alexander the Great, translated from Arabic into Latin. Another canonical text after 1300 was De anima by pseudo-Avicenna, which argued that the three basic ingredients in alchemy were human blood, hair and ...”

“... and relatively systematic expositions in, say, the Republic, Timaeus, and Sophist. Secondly, Aristotle often contrasts the metaphysical and moral views of the historical Socrates with Plato’s views; and the contrasts he draws match the contrasts which emerge from scrutiny of the dialogues. The second argument takes us significantly beyond the ...”

“... and individualism. His avowed indebtedness to the thinkers of ancient Greece, to Plato and Aristotle and the philosophers of his own youth, fell foul of the new cult of originality and the new Hellenism. The founders of modern Classical scholarship repaid their debt to their best informant on post-Aristotelian philosophy, on Roman Republican ...”

“... but I must try to say what he means, because this is the key notion in his discussion. For Aristotle and for the Medievals, human knowledge began with sense experience – to this extent, Aristotle and the Medievals were ‘empiricists’. Sense experience produced images and/or perceptions in us: phantasmata, as ...”