Post Aristotelian Classical Theories
Until the early modern era, much of the discussion which has survived today concerning nous or intellect, in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, concerned how to correctly interpret Aristotle and Plato. However, at least during the classical period, materialist philosophies, more similar to modern science, such as Epicureanism, were still relatively common also. The Epicureans believed that the bodily senses themselves were not the cause of error, but the interpretations can be. The term prolepsis was used by Epicureans to describe the way the mind forms general concepts from sense perceptions.
To the Stoics, more like Heraclitus than Anaxagoras, order in the cosmos comes from an entity called logos, the cosmic reason. But as in Anaxagoras this cosmic reason, like human reason but higher, is connected to the reason of individual humans. The Stoics however, did not invoke incorporeal causation, but attempted to explain physics and human thinking in terms of matter and forces. As in Aristotelianism, they explained the interpretation of sense data requiring the mind to be stamped or formed with ideas. However, they did not propose any in-born or acquired equivalent of the "active intellect" in order to explain how people could know understand things. Nous for them is soul "somehow disposed" (pôs echon), the soul being somehow disposed pneuma, which is fire or air or a mixture. As in Plato, they treated nous as the ruling part of the soul.
Plutarch criticized the Stoic idea of nous being corporeal, and agreed with Plato that the soul is more divine than the body while nous (mind) is more divine than the soul. The mix of soul and body produces pleasure and pain; the conjunction of mind and soul produces reason which is the cause or the source of virtue and vice. (From: “On the Face in the Moon”)
Albinus was one of the earliest authors to equate Aristotle's nous as prime mover of the Universe, with Plato's Form of the Good.
Read more about this topic: Nous, Socratic Philosophy
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