Quotes from Arthur Herman

In effect, Aristotle's logic offered the possibility of creating a universally true science out of anything—or of deconstructing claims of being a science.

Bill Knudsen summed up simply and succinctly. "Progress is only made when fear is overcome by curiosity," he said. "If you are curious enough, you will not have any fear.

Not everything that makes deductive sense may be true.b But if it doesn't fit into a syllogism, Aristotle concluded, then don't bother asking if it's true or not.

It is Cicero who made public speaking one of the essential tools of Western self-government and democracy.

This was all the average Platonist needed to hear. He didn't care about "saving the appearances," as Aristotelians did—that is, making sure that everything we see and perceive has some explanation in our general theory. The Platonist knows appearances can deceive, because matter changes. Soccer balls come and go; they get run over or get stolen. However, the geometry describing their behavior, whether spinning on their axis or at rest, lasts forever.

Boethius was deeply aware of the practical, humanistic side of Plato's thought in dialogues like the Republic, the Gorgias, and the Crito. He embraced Plato's belief that men need wisdom in order to confront and deal with evil in this world, as well as to prepare for the next. The proof is the reverence with which he invokes the name of Socrates.

Thanks to Boethius, Aristotle's logic was now available to apply the same test to Christianity's weightiest assertions about God, heaven and hell, and the Church's most cherished views about human beings and nature.

Cicero's orator is a man built to heroic proportions. He must be a man of eloquentia, with the speaking skills necessary to move great crowds. He must be a patriot whose profound love of country allows him to identify with his audience, to feel what they feel and understand their needs and desires. And he must be a man who understands the true nature of good and evil. As with Aristotle, this last is the most important quality for a great statesman and orator.

Together with Aristotle, he created a civic tradition founded on the heroic image of the orator, who inspires his countrymen by a combination of eloquence, rational argument, and moral vision, and by doing so rallies his nation in a time of crisis. From Washington's farewell speech to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Kennedy's inaugural, Cicero and Aristotle would inspire a vital part of American political culture.

It was the math that mattered. And when the math yields a pattern of harmonious proportion, whether it's the golden section of the Greeks or the Sierpinski gasket and Mandelbrot set of modern fractal geometry, the Platonist knows, as Archimedes did many centuries before, that he is standing at the threshold of the truth.

the first man to use Boethius and Aristotle to open the mind of the Dark Ages would become pope in 999 as Silvester II. Before assuming the papacy, Gerbert of Aurillac embodied the new spirit spreading across Europe as it approached the landmark date of 1000 CE, thanks in large part to Boethius.

His heart is so filled with the love of the machine that it has somewhat crowded out his love of the men who must run it.

was Gerbert who made Boethius "the schoolmaster of medieval Europe" and made Aristotle's logic the centerpiece of an education based on the seven liberal arts.15 The idea of the "liberal arts" (so called because it was the education fit for liberi, or free men, as opposed to slaves) was a late Roman invention.c16

Gerbert's first loves were the subjects of the trivium, especially rhetoric and logic. His insistence that students learn the rules of logic before embarking on anything else made Aristotle the founder of the medieval university curriculum.18

To fall for the notion of a 'double truth' and argue there was one set of truths for reason and another for faith and never the two shall meet made nonsense of the idea of truth itself.

Anyone who failed to apply the test of reasoned logic to the assertions of religious dogma was denying his own nature, Berengar said, "for it is by his reason that man resembles God.

Diogenes's goal, he said, was "to deface the coinage," meaning strip away the false conventions on which society was built and expose the raw reality underneath.

in wine, the truth

The philosophy wars in Athens between 300 and 200 BCE weary readers and scholars alike. What matters here is that they knocked mathematics and science out from the pride of place they had occupied in Plato's Academy. Plato had wanted all his students to be master mathematicians and astronomers, as well as exemplars of virtue, especially since he believed knowledge of the one pointed the way to understanding of the other.

The seventeenth century would be the great "century of genius" in science. It was the age of Galileo, Harvey, Boyle, and of course Newton. The political and social systems of Europe, however, seemed to have stalled out. Through his dark reading of Aristotle, Machiavelli had left behind a dilemma and a paradox.

Freedom, in short, must eventually lead to unfreedom. If this was true, Europeans asked, then why not start with unfreedom and be done with it? The solution seemed to be ceding all authority to a single absolute sovereign, who consciously modeled his power and glory after the ancient Roman emperors and their Neoplatonist propagandists.

Liberalism, Lasch declared, is "politically and intellectually bankrupt"; in its place, postindustrial America has created a postmodern "culture of narcissism,… which in its decadence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme.

Even the name is not his real one. His given name was Aristocles. Plato, from the Greek for "wide" or "broad," was probably a family nickname.

a mind broadened by rigorous understanding of theory, but also steeped in the nuances of actual practice.