Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Letters to Wagner' and 'Giordano Bruno and Hermetic Tradition'

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5 ideas

1. Philosophy / B. History of Ideas / 4. Early European Thought
The magic of Asclepius enters Renaissance thought mixed into Ficino's neo-platonism [Yates]
     Full Idea: The magic of Asclepius, reinterpreted through Plotinus, enters with Ficino's De Vita into the neo-platonic philosophy of the Renaissance, and, moreover, into Ficino's Christian Platonism.
     From: Frances A. Yates (Giordano Bruno and Hermetic Tradition [1964], Ch.4)
     A reaction: Asclepius is the source of 'Hermetic' philosophy. This move seems to be what gives the Renaissance period its rather quirky and distinctive character. Montaigne was not a typical figure. Most of them wanted to become gods and control the stars!
The dating, in 1614, of the Hermetic writings as post-Christian is the end of the Renaissance [Yates]
     Full Idea: The dating by Isaac Casaubon in 1614 of the Hermetic writings as not the work of a very ancient Egyptian priest but written in post-Christian times, is a watershed separating the Renaissance world from the modern world.
     From: Frances A. Yates (Giordano Bruno and Hermetic Tradition [1964], Ch.21)
     A reaction: I tend to place the end of the Renaissance with the arrival of the telescope in 1610, so the two dates coincide. Simply, magic was replaced by science. Religion ran alongside, gasping for breath. Mathematics was freed from numerology.
23. Ethics / C. Virtue Theory / 2. Elements of Virtue Theory / e. Character
Virtue comes more from habit than character [Critias]
     Full Idea: More men are good through habit than through character.
     From: Critias (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], B09), quoted by John Stobaeus - Anthology 3.29.41
26. Natural Theory / A. Speculations on Nature / 7. Later Matter Theories / a. Early Modern matter
Bare or primary matter is passive; it is clothed or secondary matter which contains action [Leibniz]
     Full Idea: The active principle is not attributed by me to bare or primary matter, which is merely passive ...but to clothed or secondary matter which in addition contains a primitive entelechy, or active principle.
     From: Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Wagner [1710], 1710 §2)
     A reaction: Secondary matter contains monads. The puzzling question is what primary matter consists of. It is not atoms, because it is infinitely divisible, and it seems to be composed of corpuscles. But what is it made of? Just gunge? He says it is 'flux'.
28. God / C. Attitudes to God / 5. Atheism
Fear of the gods was invented to discourage secret sin [Critias]
     Full Idea: When the laws forbade men to commit open crimes of violence, and they began to do them in secret, a wise and clever man invented fear of the gods for mortals, to frighten the wicked, even if they sin in secret.
     From: Critias (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], B25), quoted by Sextus Empiricus - Against the Professors (six books) 9.54