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“... Since Plato, the major European philosophers, consistent upon almost nothing else, have been united in a sustained denunciation of rhetoric. Brian Vickers’s In Defence of Rhetoric is an attempt, copious, complex, armed at all points with telling examples, to meet and turn back this onslaught, which seems so confidently sure of its own rightness ...”

“... that would have something to do with the lost underwater kingdom described in great detail by Plato in the Timaeus and Critias. But the reality was Patrick Duffy with webbed hands and fluorescent green contact lenses, painfully painted on. Sole survivor of Atlantis, he used his special powers, notably the ability to survive high atmospheric pressure, to ...”

“... instances of revulsion, it was less an objective assessment than a reflection of Greek anxiety. Plato’s generation worried that they were less fit than their grandparents, that, as Plato argued, too much readily available food and wine was undermining the health of the state. This is one of several themes Forth ...”

“... timeless ‘logo-centric’ delusion, a suprahistorical ideology existing all the way ‘from Plato to Nato’ Kermode and Eagleton have, this much in common: a mistrust of theories which assimilate history to an endless, ungrounded play of textual significations. It is equally clear where they differ, Kermode in his qualified respect for continuities of ...”

“... one’s eyes those who are good or who have been so’. Think of a quandary, and imagine ‘what Plato would have done in this situation’. Plutarch conceives of each Life as a mirror, in which readers can adjust their comportment and strive for composure. (This moralising imperative works with distorted mirrors too, when Plutarch finds fault with a ...”

“... because there is no wisdom in me; and that is true enough.’ So says Socrates at 150c of Plato’s Theaetetus, presenting himself as the barren midwife who can help deliver others of beliefs – in this case about knowledge – and test them by argument, but who does so ad hominem, uncommitted to a philosophical view of his own. An anonymous ...”

“... can in general recognise that our beliefs correspond in the required way to reality. No theme in Plato is more persistent than the emphasis on philosophical method, the search for a systematic way of arriving at important truths, and of ensuring that they are truths. Yet I think it is safe to say that Plato not only did ...”

“... Future studies of Murdoch’s fiction must begin with the Poetics and her reading of it. But Plato! The excellent indexer, who gives full details for every other entry, was daunted and wrote only: ‘Plato, passim.’ Jung said that we are born Platonists or Aristotelians. It is remarkable that both ...”

“... rhetoric, has listened with growing impatience to the discussion of justice in the first Book of Plato’s Republic. ‘What balderdash you two have been talking,’ he says to Socrates and Polemarchus. He cannot wait to astound the company, and win their acclaim, by unmasking justice as nothing but the advantage of the stronger, dominant group in ...”

“... Plato is famous for having banished poetry and poets from the ideal city of the Republic. But he did no such thing. On the contrary, poetry – the right sort of poetry – will be a pervasive presence in the society he describes. Yes, he did banish Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes – the greatest names of Greek literature ...”

“... in a warm glow from A.N. Wilson’s recent book about Iris Murdoch* – I mean its way of holding Plato and Kant not quite on a level with each other but far above everyone else except Hegel, about whom more later, in its account of her attention to the classical masters. This is a big merit, and a needful one because others, including her official ...”

“... Aristotle and Plato’, ‘Plato and Aristotle’ – the coupling of names is something we take for granted. They are the two giants of ancient philosophy, are they not, and who but Kant among later philosophers deserves to rank as high as they? Yet Aristotle’s greatness was not always so visible ...”

“... found a rational defence of his convictions through the sorts of cross-examination that we find in Plato’s dialogues. Socrates conducts strenuous, maddening and one-sided discussions of moral questions with interlocutors who lack his argumentative skill. Such discussions can show that the interlocutor’s answers are inconsistent; but how can they provide a ...”

“... of Western philosophy by furious 20th-century liberals. It belongs with Dick Crossman’s Thirties Plato Today, where Plato appears as the first fascist, or with Karl Popper’s postwar assault, The Open Society and its Enemies, which accuses Plato of racism, totalitarianism, and a fair ...”

“... in the past. The book proceeds more or less chronologically: Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, the Atomists, Aristotle, the Stoics. (An epilogue spends a page or two on Galen.) The final score is Creationists 5, Critics 2. Many scholars have thought that one of the achievements of the earliest Greek philosophers was to give a godless account of the ...”