Cosmologists seem to have settled on the idea that 13.7 billion years ago the universe appeared with a bang (the big one) from nothing — albeit a kind of nothing that included the laws of physics.
The significance of Aristotle's characterization of these states as hexeis is his decisive rejection of the thesis, found throughout Plato's early dialogues, that virtue is nothing but a kind of knowledge and vice nothing but a lack of knowledge.
His expression betrays nothing, except a kind of resignation.
"All these statements, all these messages are nothing but a kind of unacceptable public relations," Ali A. Treki of Libya told reporters at the two-day gathering.
It was a news report as much as a history painting, a protest but also a glorification, in which fully half of the canvas holds nothing but a kind of beatific twilight, turning the pale corpse into a secular pietà.
Maybe that's the ultimate awfulness of it all – that some adults see babies suckling at the breast of their mothers and feel nothing but a kind of angry resentment or jealousy, which they call offence.
The colours are almost cleansed of colour, scrubbed raw of all that colour offers by way of vibrancy and human engagement, until we are left with nothing but a kind of numbing tonal dullness of greys, off-whites, browns, all too pallid and unemphatic to stir the blood.
One evening, in October 2002 - alone in his smart, five-bedroom house in Surrey, which, he says, had become nothing but a kind of 'open prison' - Thorpe climbed into a warm bath, drank several glasses of scotch and began to appeal to God for help.
"Quite often you can have these international friendlies that sort of peter out into nothing - a kind of drab affair.
As Plato puts it: "everything that is responsible for creating something out of nothing is a kind of poetry; and so all the creations of every craft and profession are themselves a kind of poetry, and everyone who practices a craft is a poet" (Symposium, 205b, Woodruff and Nehamas translation).
