Talk:Active intellect

context

I don't understand way this article is under Judaism Category. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.177.238.237 (talk) 19:14, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

I suppose because of its mention of Maimonides JEN9841 (talk) 05:33, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Philosophy only

I removed reference to psychology in this article as it seems to be no longer in wide use. If it is important enough, I would suggest a separate article for it.JEN9841 (talk) 05:33, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Recent edits

@Carchasm: thanks for the edits. I've brought some elements back and I still don't feel totally comfortable with the removal and compression aspect. I can see that it makes sense, because the article is a bit of a patchwork and not "finished". More as a note for future editors I think personally that comments about the connections between the Greeks, Persians, Andalusians etc are an important aspect of how scholars write about this topic and these could better have been seen as anchors for future expansion than simply deleted. This as an important "history of ideas" topic, and so the way ideas moved around should be more central to the article. I also think we are not doing the topic justice if we only see the active intellect as being about "eternal life". For everyone who took this theory seriously it was most of all central to their understanding of perception, knowledge, and the possibility of science. For some of them it was also connected to their ideas about not only deity, but also what we would now call physics. Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:59, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

No worries, I agree with your additions and the general plan of the article - the goal was more to "prune" the article down and rearrange the parts in a way where it could grow, I also think it could be a lot longer and cover more. It's definitely one of the more "out there" sorts of ideas as far as philosophy goes and something that would strike most people today as "obviously wrong" but that's what makes it so interesting. If there are any reliable sources connecting it to some of the similar-but-weird ideas of the pragmatists I think we should probably add that too. - car chasm (talk) 14:29, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Haha. That is what makes it interesting, at least for me as well. I don't know of any reason to connect this particular article to the pragmatists, who also would have found it "wrong", but it depends how Aristotelian topics get handled. You might have noticed that the related articles about Common sense and Nous currently connect more easily to later theories of knowledge. This one here, like the energeia one, encapsulate more of the "anti-modern" and theological in Aristotle. (I dare to say anti-modern because Aristotle keeps contrasting himself to predecessors whose beliefs are much closer to modern thinking. He was not doing it by accident.) It is possible that the pragmatists wrote about this topic and that such comments might be notable for some reason, but that's not ringing any bell for me at the moment.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:19, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Hmm, I think I was thinking of Josiah Royce, who the more I think about it isn't technically a pragmatist. But the idea of an all encompassing consciousness that stores the concepts of "what everything is" that everyone's mind has access to seems to be a common link with Averroes. If there's no good secondary literature on it though we shouldn't put it, it's not the end of the world or anything, just an idea :). - car chasm (talk) 21:31, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

OK, I don't know about him. Don't have much time for it right now, but there may well be a possibility for future work on this. I think in any case metaphysical concepts like this are not completely dead. Apart from theologians and mystics (who we can also discuss if notable enough) there may well be serious academics out there somewhere who still write about such concepts in a way which is not purely historical. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:34, 28 January 2023 (UTC)