Armand D'Angour Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Armand D'Angour

@naspap3 Shades of Plato’s Meno! ‘But how can we know something we don’t already know?’ ‘Maybe we knew it all along…’

Armand D'Angour

More in Tim Rood's book 'The Sea, The Sea!': "Thalassa or thalatta, the former or the latter?" "The latter, said scholar Ronald Knox. ‘The latter! The latter!’ says Joyce; in Finnegans Wake ‘The letter! The litter!’, ‘kolassa! kolassa’, ‘Galata! Galata’, ‘tha lassy! tha lassy!' https://t.co/oTxzTuBMaF

Armand D'Angour

Finally got ChatGPT to admit that Socrates in Plato's Symposium simply presents Diotima's doctrine of Love uncritically as 'the truth about love' - whether or not he believed the doctrine. https://t.co/JeBVMk8ndV

Armand D'Angour

Constantly surprising to an unimaginative commentator on Plato’s Menexenus that a great writer might vary his expression in his native tongue - when he’s not indulging in outrageous irrelevance. https://t.co/kbjL6Fu5WO

Armand D'Angour

@philosophybites “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”. Lewis Carroll knew better than to think we are all Socratic rationalists...

Armand D'Angour

@cvaldary No evidence for it whatsoever. Even the idea that he discovered the proportions of the musical scale by hearing the different notes emitted by blacksmiths' hammers is unscientific fantasy. The evidence for Pythagoras is in W. Burkert 'Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism'.

Armand D'Angour

@AntigoneJournal @MGEmancipation There's no equivalent of the dog Argos in Virgil. But what a great story in Homer's Odyssey - the dog who waits for his master for 20 years, and dies when he finally sees him... https://t.co/0Dyymtjifh

Armand D'Angour

@jmoosman Given it’s Bard, can it say what Homer took from his reading of Virgil’s Aeneid?

Armand D'Angour

So much misunderstanding of Socrates’ life stems from the fantasy that he was “uneducated” and “from the lowliest of backgrounds”. Yet all the evidence - his friendship with elites, his eloquence, his intellectual breadth, his own testimony in Plato’s Apology - points otherwise.

Out of stock

Armand D'Angour

‘All biography is fiction, but fiction that has to fit the documented facts’. Donald Rayfield (Anton Chekhov, a Life, new edn 2021). Quoted by William Boyd in The Romantic (2022). Perfectly put.