Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science.
a History Of Western Philosophyby bertrand Russell
In a wise community a wise man would not seem foolish!
What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.
How does the soul enter the body from the aloofness of the intellectual world? The answer is, through appetite. But appetite, though sometimes ignoble, may be comparatively noble. At best, the soul “has the desire of elaborating order on the model of what it has seen in the Intellectual Principle (nous).” That is to say, soul contemplates the inward realm of essence, and wishes to produce something, as like it as possible.
appetite / body / intellectual / soul / World
In various ways, methods of approaching the mathematician’s ideal were sought, and the resulting suggestions were the source of much that was mistaken in metaphysics and theory of knowledge.
Like Spinoza, he has a certain kind of moral purity and loftiness, which is very impressive. He is always sincere, never shrill or censorious, invariably concerned to tell the reader, as simply as he can, what he believes to be important. Whatever one may think of him as a theoretical philosopher, it is impossible not to love him as a man. The life of Plotinus is known.
loftiness / philosopher / purity / Spinoza
Expressed itself not only in politics, but also in art, romance, chivalry, and war. It expressed itself very little in the intellectual world, because education was almost wholly confined to the clergy. The explicit philosophy of the Middle Ages is not an accurate mirror of the times, but only of what was thought by one party. Among ecclesiastics, however – especially among the Franciscan friars – a certain.
Uncomplicated joy and sorrow is not matter for philosophy, but rather for the simpler kinds of poetry and music.
joy / music / philosophy / poetry / sorrow
While I wanted to think everything false, it must necessarily be that I who thought was something; and remarking that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so solid and so certain that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were incapable of upsetting it, I judged that I could receive it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy that I sought.
false / philosophy / sceptics / truth
But truth is not the only merit that a metaphysic can possess. It may have beauty, and this is certainly to be found in Plotinus; there are passages that remind one of the later cantos of Dante’s Para-diso, and of almost nothing else in literature.
Dante / literature / Metaphysic / Plotinus / truth