Search Results

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... made a heroic effort to save and protect philosophy.’ The great classical philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Farabi, Maimonides) engaged in this effort, Bloom claims, by composing esoteric works which often seem to unite philosophy and public life. But the philosophers know that society will never consent to be governed according to their objective ...”

“... by wishes. Pears goes on to consider a number of philosophical accounts of irrational behaviour. Aristotle’s term akrasia, though often mistranslated as ‘weakness of will’, is better represented by ‘lack of control’, the implication being that the agent’s reason is not in control of his actions. ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the need for attention to what she calls the ‘central human capabilities’. This student of Aristotle and of Marx, and sometime collaborator with Amartya Sen, insists that a truly human life is characterised at the very minimum by the possibility of functioning in certain ways. We can judge whether this bare minimum is met by asking not about how ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”