display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
4 ideas
| 21875 | The wisdom of a free man is a meditation on life, not on death [Spinoza] |
| Full Idea: A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death. | |
| From: Baruch de Spinoza (The Ethics [1675], IV Pr 67) | |
| A reaction: Life and death are not so easy to separate. You could hardly be wise about life if you didn't incorporate its finite duration into your wisdom. |
| 17230 | If we are not wholly wise, we should live by good rules and maxims [Spinoza] |
| Full Idea: The best thing we can do, so long as we lack a perfect knowledge of our feelings, is to conceive a right rule of life, or sure maxims of life - to commit these to memory, and constantly apply these to particular cases. | |
| From: Baruch de Spinoza (The Ethics [1675], V Pr 10) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the role of folk wisdom - to try to plant guidance in the heads of the not-so-wise. |
| 9198 | It is no longer possible to be a sage, but we can practice the exercise of wisdom [Hadot] |
| Full Idea: Personally I firmly believe, perhaps naively, that it is possible for modern man to live, not as a sage (sophos) - most of the ancients did not hold this to be possible - but as a practitioner of the ever-fragile exercise of wisdom. | |
| From: Pierre Hadot (Philosophy as a way of life [1987], 7) | |
| A reaction: It seems to me quite plausible that the philosophical life might yet become a widespread ideal, even though philosophers seem to still be sheltering from storms two thousand years after Plato gave us that image. |
| 17200 | We must be careful to keep words distinct from ideas and images [Spinoza] |
| Full Idea: It is necessary that we should distinguish between ideas and the words by which things are signified. ...Images, words, and ideas are by many people altogether confounded. | |
| From: Baruch de Spinoza (The Ethics [1675], II Pr 49) |