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Stone’s Socrates

Alan Ryan, 27 October 1988

The Trial of Socrates 
by I.F. Stone.
Cape, 282 pp., £12.95, September 1988, 0 224 02591 0
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... 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 cross-section of the sins of Hegel and Marx. Where Stone is unusual is in making Socrates as big a villain as his disciple ...

Someone Else, Somewhere Else

Peter Clarke, 13 November 1997

Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals 
edited by Niall Ferguson.
Picador, 548 pp., £20, April 1997, 9780330351324
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... allows contingency a crucial role. While building on the insights of predecessors like Bury, Popper or W.B. Gallie, Ferguson reformulates the essential arguments with a characteristically late 20th-century appeal to chaos theory in reconciling causation and contingency. ‘Chaos – stochastic behaviour in deterministic systems – means unpredictable ...

Out of Bounds

Ian Gilmour: Why Wordsworth sold a lot less than Byron, 20 January 2005

The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period 
by William St Clair.
Cambridge, 765 pp., £90, July 2004, 9780521810067
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... in determining the cultural consciousness of 18th-century society will have obvious echoes of Karl Marx. But, just as Popper pointed out that while Beethoven was affected by such social developments as the enlargement of the orchestra, no theory of metaphysical or materialist determinism could explain a single bar of ...

What’s not to like?

Stefan Collini: Ernest Gellner, 2 June 2011

Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography 
by John Hall.
Verso, 400 pp., £29.99, July 2010, 978 1 84467 602 6
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... and sociological idea of science – a mode of inquiry, a methodological icon. He had first read Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies in 1946 and Hall describes it as ‘the book which was to influence him more than any other’. It is noticeable that Gellner did not seem to relativise science in the way that Weber had relativised the pervasive process of ...

Against Belatedness

Richard Rorty, 16 June 1983

The Legitimacy of the Modern Age 
by Hans Blumenberg, translated by Robert Wallace.
MIT, 786 pp., £28.10, June 1983, 0 262 02184 6
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... and purported inevitability characteristic of the genre, and condemned by liberals such as Popper and Berlin. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit was published in 1966, and has been much discussed in Germany, though not much elsewhere. Badly-educated English-speaking philosophers like myself (the kind who read long books in German only if they absolutely have ...

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