Plotinus and the Artistic Imagination

In the thought of Plotinus, the imagination is responsible for the apprehension of the activity of Intellect. If creativity in the arts involves an exercise of the imagination, the image-making power that links sense perception to noetic thought and the nous poietikos, the poetic or creative intellect, then the arts exercise the apprehension of intellectual activity. According to John Dillon in “Plotinus and the Transcendental Imagination,” Plotinus’ conception of the imagination led to the formulation of the imagination as a basis of artistic creativity. In Plotinus, imagination operates on several different levels: it produces images in sense perception, it synthesizes images in dianoetic thought, and it produces images in correspondence with the articulation through logos of noetic thought. The imagination is what connects the intelligible in intellect and the form in sense perception. Plotinus imagines an art which is a product of noetic thought as made possible by the imagination. The primary principle of beauty is Intellect, from which all images should be taken, as facilitated by imagination. Forms of art, like the forms of nature, are the product of Intellect. The production of a work of art is an intellectual or spiritual exercise of the imagination that allows apprehension of Intellect and noesis in nous poietikos. All art is metaphysical, and is an expression of intelligible form in imagination, an expression of an intellectual idea that can be differentiated from sensible form in intellectual apprehension. There are many ways in which the tenets of the thought of Plotinus become currents of art and aesthetic theory as it develops to the present day

Neoplatonism in the Liber Naturalis and Shifā: De anima or Metaphysica of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā)

Avicenna or Ibn Sīnā was born circa 980 in Afshna, near Bukhara, in Persia. He worked briefly for the Samanid administration, but left Bukhara, and lived in the area of Tehran and Isfahan, where he completed the Shifā (Healing [from error]) under the patronage of the Daylamite ruler, ‘Ala’-al Dawla, and wrote his most important Persian work, the Dānish-nāma, which contains works on logic, metaphysics, physics, and mathematics

Phantasms in music

Tese de mestrado, Teoria da Literatura, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2009Esta tese é sobre a forma como a música pode ser descrita mimeticamente. Começando por discutir o tratamento contemporâneo deste tópico, comparo vários argumentos sobre música (em particular música e representação') e descrevo a razão porque estes são relevantes para a questão original da mimêsis. No segundo e terceiro capítulos, discuto ideias ou soluções (para o problema da música mimética' de Aristóteles) para os problemas colocados no primeiro capítulo, e relaciono estes com conceitos usados por Aristóteles nos seus escritos sobre música. O terceiro capítulo trata especificamente do tópico da phantasia e dou ênfase à importância da phantasia no argumento de Aristóteles sobre mimêsis e imitações em relação à música.This thesis attempts to describe how music can be called mimetic. Beginning with a discussion of current work on this topic, I compare various arguments on music (mainly music and representation') and why I find them to be relevant to this original question of mimêsis. In the second and third chapters, I build on ideas or solutions (for the mimetic music' problem originally taken from Aristotle) for problems posed in the first chapter and relate them to concepts Aristotle uses when writing about music. The third chapter specifically treats the topic of phantasia and I propose the importance of phantasia in Aristotle's argument of mimesis and imitations as related to music

Philosophy of Intellect in the Long Commentary on the De anima of Averroes

In the Long Commentary on the De anima, Averroes posits three separate intelligences in the anima rationalis or the rational soul: agent intellect or intellectus agens, material or passible intellect, intellectus possibilis or intellectus passibilis, and speculative intellect, intellectus speculativus, or actualized or acquired intellect, intellectus adeptus. In the De anima 3.1.5, “there are three parts of the intellect in the soul; the first is the receptive intellect, the second, the active intellect, and the third is actual intellection…,” that is, speculative or actualized, agent, and material. While material intellect is “partly generable and corruptible, partly eternal,” corporeal and incorporeal, the speculative and agent intellects are purely eternal and incorporeal. In the De anima 3.1.5, the existence of intelligibles or first principles in intellect, as they are understood in actualized intellect, “does not simply result from the reception of the object,” the sensible form in sense perception in material intellect, “but consists in attention to, or perception of, the represented forms…,” the cognition of the forms in actualized intellect wherein they can be understood as intelligibles, which requires both the participation of active intellect and the motivation of the individual for intellectual development. The goal of intellectual development is to achieve union with active intellect, the final entelechy, and through this union the highest bliss in life can be achieved. Such bliss can only be achieved “in the eve of life.” All individual material intellects are capable of some ability to form concepts and abstract ideas at a basic level, but beyond that intellectual development varies among individuals according to the level of volition. Complete knowledge of the material world results in complete unity between the material intellect and the active intellect