Nous

Author(s):  
A.A. Long

Commonly translated as ‘mind’ or ‘intellect’, the Greek word nous is a key term in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus. What gives nous its special significance there is not primarily its dictionary meaning – other nouns in Greek can also signify the mind – but the value attributed to its activity and to the metaphysical status of things that are ‘noetic’ (intelligible and incorporeal) as distinct from being perceptible and corporeal. In Plato’s later dialogues, and more systematically in Aristotle and Plotinus, nous is not only the highest activity of the human soul but also the divine and transcendent principle of cosmic order.

2019 ◽  
pp. 192-209
Author(s):  
Дионисий Шленов

В XI в. монах Студийского монастыря прп. Никита Стифат в аскетико-богословском корпусе своих сочинений неоднократно пользовался выражениями «главные добродетели» и «главные страсти». В статье делается попытка раскрыть смысл выражения«главные добродетели», систематизировать представления автора о четырех главных добродетелях, известных ему от античной традиции через посредство христианских авторов, продолжавших и далее свободно пользоваться этим выражением. Общий контекст позволяет выявить своеобразие автора, который сравнивает «четыре главные добродетели» с четырехчастностью человеческой души как великого мира по сравнению с внешним, малым, миром, состоявшим, согласно античным представлениям, из четырех первоэлементов. Особо рассматривается еще более детализированное сравнение четырех добродетелей с четырьмя способностями высшей части души - разума. Наряду с этим, автор сопоставляет пять чувств тела и пять разумных сил души. Для прп. Никиты четыре главные добродетели являются основополагающими, что не исключает особого внимания автора к ряду других ключевых добродетелей, таких как смирение и любовь. Учение о четырех главных добродетелях отсутствует в корпусе сочинений учителя прп. Никиты - прп. Симеона Нового Богослова, что сильнее подчеркивает более«школьный» и компилятивный характер наследия Стифата. Учение Стифата рассматривается в контексте античной и византийской литературы. In the XI century a monk of the Studite monastery St. Nicetas Stethatus in the ascetic-theological corpus of his writings repeatedly used the expressions “main virtues” and “main passions”. The article attempts to uncover the meaning of the expression “main virtues”, to systematize the author’s ideas about the four main virtues, known to him from the ancient tradition through Christian authors, who continued to use this expression freely. The general context makes it possible to reveal the originality of the author, who compares the “four main virtues” with the fourfold part of the human soul as a great world compared to the external, small, world, which, according to ancient concepts, consisted of four primary elements. Particularly, an even more detailed comparison of the four virtues with the four abilities of the higher part of the soul, the mind, is considered. Along with this, the A. compares the five senses of the body and the five rational powers of the soul. For St. Nicetas the four main virtues are fundamental, which does not exclude the A.’s special attention to a number of other key virtues, such as humility and love. The doctrine of the four main virtues is missing from the corpus of St. Nicetas/St. Simeon the New Theologian, which more strongly emphasizes the more “school-like” and compilative nature of St. Stethatus’ heritage. The doctrines of Stethatus are considered in the context of ancient Byzantine literature.


2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (12) ◽  
pp. 3-4
Author(s):  
Edward J. Furton ◽  

The materialistic premise supposes that a patient’s reduced brain activity indicates that the mind is beginning to approach nonexistence. Such persons may not be brain dead, but they have a life that is close enough to death to allow us to treat them with a certain disregard. For the Catholic, this overlooks the enduring presence of the soul and its two spiritual powers of intellect and will. St. Thomas Aquinas is our best guide to exploring the implications of this view for patients in states of diminished consciousness. The externally observable activity of the brain, even when dramatically lessened, does not represent any loss of the powers of the soul, which continue to function through a combination of natural and divine influences.


Author(s):  
O. Osadcha

The article reveals regularities between the spatial structure of the city-temple-icons and the similar structural principle, which, in the context of Hesychast anthropology, acts in the topography of the human soul. The spatial structure of the Tree of Life, a universal symbol contained in the topographical icons of the level and of the city, temple, icon, and human, is developed and proposed. It is proved that the spatial framework of the Tree of Life is the Golgotha ​​Cross. Considerable attention is paid to the analysis of the main spatial zones of the temple-icons, which have a hierarchical construction. It is assumed that the topographical icon of the city-temple-icon-human is arranged in such a way that it is possible to overcome the ontological gap that was created as a result of original sin. Particularly with the help of distinct geometric constants that determine the structure of the Tree of Life, ancient iconographs tried to restrain/seal the gaping hole, which seemed to be an insurmountable Rubicon, at the moment of the fall between the Spirit and the soul, the mind and heart of man, earthly and divine, profane and sacred worlds. Consequently, the use of sacred numbers was deliberately incorporated into sacred texts, icons, and in the architecture and iconographic programs of the temples. It was analyzed that the internal structure/main sacral energy framework of the icon-temple contains compositional nodes associated with the disclosure of the main semantic load in the iconographic program/plot, and are always constructed on the lines of the golden section. Some regularities in the placement of the central figure in the composition of the temple icon are traced. In the temple, as in the icon, the semantic center of the sacred space is the image of Christ the Almighty, who is placed in a top of an equilateral triangle with a side size corresponding to the width of the temple. The center of the Nimbus passes through the golden section. In the context of the relationship between the topography of the icon-temple and the proposed scheme for determining the topography of the human soul. According to the analogy principle, the structural-spatial scheme of the Tree of Life in the anthropological aspect is associated with the stages of the spiritual perfection of the human soul.


Author(s):  
Dominic Scott

The idea that knowledge exists latently in the mind, independently of sense experience, is put forward in three of Plato’s dialogues: the Meno, the Phaedo and the Phaedrus. The claim is that the human soul exists before it enters a body, and that in its pre-existent state it knows certain things, which it forgets at birth. What we call ‘learning’ during our mortal lives is in fact nothing but the recollection of pre-existent knowledge. In a particularly famous passage in the dialogue the Meno, the character Socrates sets an uneducated slave boy a geometrical puzzle. After asking a series of questions, he elicits the correct answer from the boy, which he claims existed in him all along, merely needing to be aroused by the process of recollection. Aristotle dismisses recollection quite brusquely and tries to explain human learning by appeal to sense perception. In post-Aristotelian philosophy, it unclear how far any theory of innateness was accepted. Most probably, the Stoics thought that in some sense moral concepts and beliefs arise from human nature, though they did not endorse a theory of pre-existence or recollection.


Philosophy ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 60 (234) ◽  
pp. 477-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cockburn

‘Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’.1 ‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul’. Anyone who believes that Wittgenstein's remarks here embody important truths has quite a bit of explaining to do. What needs to be explained is why it is that enormous numbers of people, people who have never had the chance to be corrupted by reading Descartes or Dennett, are willing, with only the slightest prompting, to speak in ways which appear to conflict dramatically with Wittgenstein's thought. Many people appear to find no difficulty at all in the idea that we could ascribe thoughts, sensations, emotions and so on to things which in no way resemble or behave like a living human being—for example to disembodied ‘minds’ or ‘souls’ or disembodied brains floating in tanks. And with a little more pressing many will agree that it is never to the living human being that these states are, strictly speaking, correctly ascribed; but, rather, to one part of the living human being—the brain, for example. Now if this incredibly widespread tendency is the expression of confusion then we need an explanation of its existence. We need this partly because without it it will be difficult to undermine the tendency; and partly because we might expect that such a widespread tendency is a distortion of some truth.


2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL E. MARMURA

In Avicenna's expositions of his theory of the temporal origination of the human rational soul, its ḥudūth, one meets difficulties in understanding of what he actually means. Some of the expressions used are left unexplained and one has to extract their meaning from discussions given in a different context. There are also ambiguities in his use of such terms as al-‘aql al-kulliyy (the universal intellect) and al-nafs al-kulliyya (the universal soul). Although in one place he makes it clear that these expressions refer to concepts that exist only in the mind, distinguishing them from ‘aql al-kull (the intellect of ‘the whole [universal]') and nafs al-kull (the soul of ‘the whole [universel]'), the distinction is not uniformly observed. In a number of his works the term ‘‘universal'' is used to refer to both the celestial intellect and the celestial soul. There is also an ambiguity in his statements about the role the celestial soul plays in the emanation of the human rational soul. In some discussions he seems to hold that the rational human soul emanates from both the celestial intellect and the celestial soul. The Metaphysics of al-Shifā' (The Healing) suggests a resolution of this ambiguity. At the same time, there are statements in this work that are left unexplained and one has to look for their explanation in other books of The Healing. Thus questions do arise regarding the details of Avicenna's theory of the temporal origination of the human rational soul. His general exposition of his theory, however, remains comprehensible, its pivotal position within his entire philosophical system clear.


PMLA ◽  
1937 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 835-847
Author(s):  
Newton P. Stallknecht

For Wordsworth imagination is the link between the visible and the invisible world. Esthetic enjoyment of things visible seems at times to bring the very life of the invisible before us. The more freely we plunge into the beauty of Nature, the more palpable becomes the Spirit of Nature. The grounds for such a belief are mystical and sheerly intuitive: we may not hope to reproduce them in argument. We can trace, however, the ways by which Wordsworth tried to describe such experience and to make it communicable. Throughout, he seems certain that in the apprehension of beauty, the human soul is never isolated, but is in contact with a spiritual urgency, which is the origin of beauty. On the other hand, the agony of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, his utter loneliness of spirit, is in diametric opposition to any love or enjoyment of Nature. Here the mind is closed to any communion or inspiration. It is also without imaginative enjoyment. The Mariner's release from such isolation depends upon the reawakening of his esthetic sensitiveness. In this essay, we shall consider the relation which seems to pertain in Wordsworth's thought between imagination and our awareness of Nature as a mind or spirit. We shall find that for Wordsworth, the boundaries of the finite soul are not final but seem to expand or almost to disappear in the perception of beauty.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-347
Author(s):  
Hisikia Gulo ◽  
Hendi Hendi

This article is a review of the spirituality of Jesus prayer according to the    Philokalia Fathers for the spiritual growth of the congregation in a book entitled Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, this book is a book that is not widely known by believers because this topic is rarely discussed, even studied by the Church. The aim of this research is to explore that the Jesus Prayer Prayer is a spiritual discipline, its practice is to help a person control the mind of many wandering thoughts so that they can focus more on Jesus Christ. The research method is literature and then interaction with other related texts in the Bible and other Church Fathers. The results of the analysis show that the Prayer of Jesus praying for mercy from God will make someone realize that only God is the source of help in the pain and suffering of the human soul and body.


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