Elias and David: Introductions to Philosophy with Olympiodorus: Introduction to Logic by Olympiodorus Gertz Sebastian

Author:Olympiodorus,Gertz, Sebastian
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350051768
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2018-02-06T05:00:00+00:00

Lecture 15

Let Pythagoras be the beginning and end for us, since he used to turn towards himself and to connect the beginning with the end like the circle, where the beginning is also connected to the end. [30] So <Pythagoras>115 is the beginning and the end for us; the beginning, because his definitions came in the beginning, i.e. ‘philosophy is the knowledge of real beings qua real beings’, and further, ‘[philosophy is the] knowledge of divine and human things’; the end, because his definition comes again at the end, [46,1] i.e. ‘philosophy is love of wisdom’. We should know that some people have criticized the present definition on the grounds that correct definitions usually convert but the present one does not. For if something is philosophy, it is love of wisdom, but it is not the case that if something is love of wisdom, it is philosophy, since every craft [5] desires its own subject matter.

Now we can reply that the present definition is correct, since it is by Pythagoras. For he was the first person <to define philosophy, but then>116 the word ‘wisdom’ was <incorrectly> applied to the manual crafts too, as the poet shows when he says ‘a wise carpenter fitted them together’,117 applying the word ‘wise’ to the carpenter. <And Pythagoras when defining the wise man>118 applied ‘wisdom’ to knowledge of real being, and [10] was the first to call only knowledge of real being, i.e. god, ‘wisdom’. The divine is called ‘real being’ in the strict sense since it always exists, because being is what always remains the same and never changes. So Pythagoras called the desire for being, i.e. the divine, ‘philosophy’. We should know that strictly speaking, we ought to apply the word ‘wisdom’ all the more to the divine, since [15] wisdom (sophia) is said to be a kind of ‘preserver’ (saophia), i.e. the preserver of light (hê to phôs sôzousa). Since the divine is immaterial and not receptive of opposites, it preserves the light of its own nature. What is material, i.e. what is in the sensible world, on the other hand, does not preserve the light of its own nature, because it can receive opposites and is obscured by them.

Some people raise the following puzzle: ‘if the divine is [20] manifest by nature, why is it not so for us?’ We can reply that just as the sun, which is naturally bright, seems rather dim to bats because of the unfitness of their sense-organs, i.e. because they do not see in daytime, so too the divine, which is manifest and pure by nature, is not manifest to us because the eye of our soul is obscured by the mist of the body, i.e. by [25] pleasurable indulgences.119 So much about these matters.

But we should know that philosophy has many degrees, since one employs many degrees [of knowledge] in order to know philosophy. One needs to know the five powers of knowledge, which are perception, imagination, opinion, discursive thinking (dianoia), and intellect.

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