About G.M.A Grube's translations of Plato: "Unmistakably superior: more lucid, more accurate, more readable. Above all, they’re lucidly adorned, unpretentious, and in translating Plato that counts a good deal. The prose is, as English prose, persuasive, cogent, and as eloquent as it can be without departing from the text. --William Arrowsmith.

The third volume of Professor Guthrie's great history of Greek thought, entitled The Fifth-Century Enlightenment, deals in two parts with the Sophists and Socrates, the key figures in the dramatic and fundamental shift of philosophical interest from the physical universe to man. Each of these parts is now available as a paperback with the text, bibliography and indexes amended where necessary so that each part is self-contained. The Sophists assesses the contribution of individuals like Protagoras, Gorgias and Hippias to the (...) extraordinary intellectual and moral fermant in fifth-century Athens. They questioned the bases of morality, religion and organized society itself and the nature of knowledge and language; they initiated a whole series of important and continuing debates, and they provoked Socrates and Plato to a major restatement and defence of traditional values. (shrink)

The work of Professor Jaeger on the Aristotelian metaphysics, and its modification by the late Hans von Arnim, have raised many new points of the greatest interest, and may, I hope, be considered as having opened up a large and fascinating new field for discussion rather than as having closed the matter. It is a subject which must be considered as a whole. There would be little profit in writing short notes on isolated points in the arguments of the two (...) scholars. Anyone who, possessed of some previous acquaintance with the Aristotelian corpus, reads their work is inevitably stimulated to return to Aristotle with his mind full of fresh ideas. If after a re-examination of the texts he feels he has a different story to tell, he must tell it for himself. That is my excuse for an account which must include much which was always known and much which has arisen out of the work of Jaeger and von Arnim. My conclusions are not the same as theirs, and the argument must stand or fall as a consistent whole. (shrink)

Austin argued that ‘if’ has sometimes a non-conditional function, his reason being that some types of if-statement are deviant by two criteria which establish a norm. Following Pears more or less closely, I shall refer to applications of these criteria as the contrapositive and nondetachment tests, and to any if-statement which fails at least one test as a pseudoconditional, or more briefly as a pseudo. Thus, to turn directly to the narrower subject of this paper- the singularity Austin exposed in (...) a thesis of Moore's - ‘He can, if he chooses’ fails either test. It does not entail ‘lf he cannot, he does not choose to’. Nor does it entail ‘He can’. Hence, it is doubly pseudo - and the same applies after systematic variation in grammatical person, tense and mood. (shrink)

Originally published 1978.This volume examines the purpose and the functioning of the present education system inthe UK and when it was originally published it was the first overall review of developments in British education since the 1944 Education Act. It discusses some of the most significant reforms which have stemmed from developments in the primary schools, in particular from the adoption of child-centred and progressive methods of teaching.

The following remarks are frankly speculative, and their subject one on which certainty is unlikely to be attained. It seems worth offering them because, though the conclusions are only tentative, they were reached by way of some observations which have a certain interest of their own. Anaximenes, we are told, said that the sun is flat like a leaf, and that it and the other heavenly bodies ‘ride upon’ the air owing to their flat shape, as does the earth also.

The third volume of Professor Guthrie's great history of Greek thought, entitled The Fifth-Century Enlightenment, deals in two parts with the Sophists and Socrates, the key figures in the dramatic and fundamental shift of philosophical interest from the physical universe to man. Each of the two parts is available as a paperback with the text, bibliography and indexes amended where necessary so that each part is self-contained. Socrates dominated the controversies of this period, as he has dominated the subsequent history (...) of western philosophy. He was the first to identify and grapple with some of the most intractable and persistent logical and philosophical problems; but he was also and has remained a highly controversial figure because of his extraordinary personal qualities and his remarkable career. Professor Guthrie offers a balanced and comprehensive picture of the man, his life, and his thought. (shrink)

It would therefore be reasonable to undertake a description and appreciation of this book precisely in its character as a dialectical dictionary or magazine of aesthetic issues and arguments. One could conduct a guided tour, stopping to admire the fullness of information, or fertility of invention, and the nicely graded series of the ideas collected in this locus or that, or in some area where one happened to be well enough informed, noting the omissions. One might even raise a theoretical (...) question about this whole aspect of the work, starting with the author's bald assertion: "What I have written is, simply and literally, a guide to aesthetics—a guide to the structure and problems of the subject, not to its literature." His "approach," he says, "is systematic, not historical." He "mentions names," but he says he is "not concerned much with who first said what," and his references are not always to the "earliest or best exponents of the views they illustrate". Much of the literature he says he has not read and does not mean to read. One who has himself not read all of the aesthetic literature can hardly object to this very strenuously. (shrink)