Last week I quoted Plotinus about how the soul may use the body as an instrument without thereby sharing the experiences of the body. In the comments beneath that post, one will see Henry's observation that, if "soul" here means "mind," the observation is unremarkable. If soul means something else, it is nonsensical. Allow me to expand. Plotinus is using "soul" here to mean "active intellect," and he is expounding on a distinction between the active and the passive intellect. Centuries before him, Aristotle had written in De Anima , that "knowledge in activity is identical with the subject; but knowledge in potentiality pre-exists in the individual...." That is one of the more mysterious of his observations! And no, more context would not resolve the mystery but would deepen it. Here is the context if you want it. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Vital_Principle/Book_3/Chapter_5 The "knowledge in potentiality" ...
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Continuing a thought from last week ... Aristotle is our main source for Zeno's paradoxes. As a side note, there is no mention of a turtle in Aristotle's account of the paradox of Achilles' race with a slower runner. The slower runner is just that. The paradox began to turn on Achilles against a turtle when Simplicius wrote up his paraphrase. Simplicius didn't come along and write his commentaries on Aristotle until the early 6th century AD -- three centuries after the flourishing of Diogenes of Laertius. I am still puzzled that D of L is so scattershot about Zeno and that when he does get around to the argument about motion, gives only one version of it, the idea that something is either at motion in a particular moment or at rest, and that a moving object can't really be either of those. But let us not go there. Let us go back to Simplicius. I wonder: was he simply paraphrasing Aristotle and adding some zoological pizzazz to it by throwing in the...
I only learned quite recently about the 5th century philosopher Syrianus, a late neoplatonist. I'm going to give you a rather lengthy italicized quote from him. He is discussing Aristotle, and in particular a critique Aristotle offered of both Plato and Pythagoras. I am not a natural controversialist, nor yet would I count myself as a disciple of Aristotle on merely a few or trivial topics; rather, I am one of those who admire both his logical methodology overall and who accept with enthusiasm his treatment of ethical and physical questions. And that I may not make a bore of myself by enumerating in detail all the excellent aspects of this man’s philosophy, let me just ask why every intelligent person might not justly marvel at the apt remarks, accompanied by demonstrations of the highest quality, to be found in this most excellent treatise on the subject of both forms in matter and definitions, and on the subject of the divine and unmoved transcendent causal principles of ...
Plotinus wrote that, yes, the sensible world is a mere imperfect copy of the intelligible world, but he also wrote against the pessimism of the gnostics, against the idea that the sensible world is a bad thing. He wrote thus: “what more beautiful image could there be? After the fire of the intelligible world, what better image of it could there be than our fire? What earth, outside of the intelligible earth, could be better than ours?" In short: yes, we live in a cave looking at shadows, but the cave is not at all a bad place to be. Those who aren't philosophers (most of the species, on Plotinian premises) can never get outside the cave, but that doesn't make their fate too dire. They get to look at all those fascinating shadows on the wall. Meanwhile for those few who can sometimes get out of the cave and look at the real world ands even glimpse the sun, those times are of necessity brief. We'll have to return to the cave. We can resign ourselves to th...