Nous

Few concepts traverse the history of Western philosophy with such persistence as nous (νοῦς). The Greek word designates, depending on context, mind, intellect, intelligence, or reason — but its philosophical reach exceeds any of these translations taken alone. From the moment Anaxagoras elevated it to a cosmic ordering principle, through Plato’s elaboration and Aristotle’s analysis of intellect in the De Anima, to the emanationist metaphysics of Plotinus and the intense medieval debates between Averroes and Thomas Aquinas, nous constitutes a guiding thread that links cosmology, psychology, and theology in a single conceptual arc. ...

At the turn of the third century CE, when the philosophical schools of Antiquity seemed to have exhausted their possibilities, a thinker born in Roman Egypt undertook the most ambitious metaphysical synthesis the ancient world had ever seen. Plotinus (c. 205–270 CE) did more than comment on Plato: he transformed Platonism into a complete ontological architecture centered on the idea that all of reality emanates from an absolute principle — the One — and that the destiny of the human soul is to return to that primordial unity. ...

Anaxagoras Born in Clazomenae, in Ionia, around 500 BCE, Anaxagoras was the first philosopher to bring the Ionian tradition to Athens, where he lived for some thirty years and became a friend and adviser of the statesman Pericles. His intellectual boldness cost him dearly: accused of impiety for holding that the Sun was not a god but an incandescent stone, he was put on trial and had to leave the city, taking refuge in Lampsacus. ...