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“... 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 ...”

“... How you punish a thief, in Plato, depends on the nature of the theft – and always on the status of the thief. The thing that’s stolen is also an issue. In the Laws a slave who steals ‘an object of no great value’ should be soundly beaten. But if a free man steals the same object, he should repay the owner ten times its value ...”

“... 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 Pill’ will matter ...”

“... including enforced abortion and infanticide. The theory of selective breeding is as old as Plato, who took his ideas from Lycurgus of Sparta. In the post-Darwinian period the advocates of selective breeding were concerned not merely to make the best of imperfect human nature but to improve on it, and to prevent what was seen as the imminent threat of ...”

“... for starting from him rather than from what one might have thought the more obvious choice of Plato, the true parent of therapeutic philosophy. She then leads us through the arguments, aims and procedures of the Epicureans, the Sceptics and the Stoics. It is rather sad, as Nussbaum herself says, that she has not given us the Cynics, a movement (if it ...”

“... thought, or moral nihilists, and denying that moral questions have true answers. Others like Plato, conclude that ethics remains possible, but only by rising above human moral diversity to ‘a God’s-eye view’ of right and wrong. Stout’s point of departure is that to aspire to such a view is vain: it is the ancient sin symbolised as the building of ...”

“... relationship with moral rectitude has bothered thinkers at least since the time when Socrates and Plato turned against the brilliant cultural machine of ancient Athens and postulated a more perfect world in a transcendent realm of Idea. So, too, there are moments when the sky over Florence is so blue, the hills so green, the city so elegant, that the song ...”

“... Dave to act. They do a scene from Rebel without a Cause in which Jim Stark (James Dean) gives Plato (Sal Mineo) his jacket. Plato, secretly in love with Jim, rubs the jacket against his cheek and sniffs it. Dave refuses to do this, then complains that James gets to be Dean. ‘You can’t play James Dean,’ Franco ...”

“... thought all experience was valuable, an opinion not shared by the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay. Plato and Spinoza saw it as a realm of illusion, to be contrasted with the pure light of reason. Jacques Derrida deeply disliked the notion, suspecting it of dark metaphysical tendencies. For William Blake, from whom Martin Jay takes the title of his absorbing ...”

“... of art is said to be a footnote to Alberti, just as all philosophy is said to be a footnote to Plato. Anthony Grafton admits that he comes to Alberti not as an art historian but as an outsider. On the other hand, outsiders can revitalise a subject withered by odium academicum, and Grafton has achieved this in the first intellectual biography of Alberti to ...”

“... light fondling in his office. A large, monumentally ugly man who had written an important book on Plato, On Plato’s Roaring Darkness. He smelled like dust. She was 22 and thought him too old to worry about, anyway that’s how things worked then. Flakes of skin scattered over his lapel where her face got pressed into it ...”

“... of her hand. She tried unsuccessfully to run an English salon and to preserve sanity by keeping Plato and Aristotle at her bedside; but that did not stop her dancing with the equivalent of toy boys in the ominously named Patent Leather Room. Meeting Chaplin, she said he did not look as funny as she had expected, and he replied: ‘Neither do you.’ The ...”

“... Britain in his early twenties and spent some time pursuing a doctorate at Cambridge on Shelley and Plato. When Germaine Greer appeared with him on the Australian version of Parkinson, she said in that professionally challenging manner of hers: ‘What I want to know, Clive, is do you ever think any more about Plato and ...”

“... that one of the benefits of a study of history is that it is always possible to reverse, as Plato put it, an apparently fatal tendency towards decay, however late the hour …’ The weight of our planet’s unfinished history is, apparently, marshalled behind this concluding gesture. But of course, it is the gesture itself that counts. It has dictated ...”