Latin Philosophy Quotes

Non est ad astra mollis e terris via" - "There is no easy way from the earth to the stars

Fas est ab hoste doceri. One should learn even from one's enemies.

What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.

Pactum serva" - "Keep the faith

Saepe creat molles aspera spina rosas" - "Often the prickly thorn produces tender roses

I now know, by an almost fatalistic conformity with the facts, that my destiny is to travel...

A man leaves his great house because he's bored With life at home, and suddenly returns, Finding himself no happier abroad. He rushes off to his villa driving like mad, You'ld think he's going to a house on fire, And yawns before he's put his foot inside, Or falls asleep and seeks oblivion, Or even rushes back to town again. So each man flies from himself (vain hope, because It clings to him the more closely against his will) And hates himself because he is sick in mind And does not know the cause of his disease.

Sometimes in life confusion tends to arise and only dialogue of dance seems to make sense.

Caution not spirit, let it roam wild; for in that natural state dance embraces divine frequency.

If movements were a spark every dancer would desire to light up in flames.

Dance as the narration of a magical story; that recites on lips, illuminates imaginations and embraces the most sacred depths of souls.

Show me a person who found love in his life and did not celebrate it with a dance.

Dance is the timeless interpretation of life.

If spirit is the seed, dance is the water of its evolution.

Barba non facit philosophum

Life is an affair of mystery; shared with companions of music, dance and poetry.

If you opened the dictionary and searched for the meaning of a Goddess, you would find the reflection of a dancing lady.

Don't breathe to survive; dance and feel alive.

Dance to inspire, dance to freedom, life is about experiences so dance and let yourself become free.

Through synergy of intellect, artistry and grace came into existence the blessing of a dancer.

DANCE – Defeat All Negativity (via) Creative Expression.

She who is a dancer can only sway the silk of her hair like the summer breeze.

Dance is the ritual of immortality.

I can show you a philtre, compounded without drugs, herbs, or any witch's incantation: 'If you want to be loved, love.

One step, two steps, three steps; like winds of time experience joy of centuries, when movements become revelations of the dance of destinies.

Perhaps he has confused making money with freedom.

Isn't language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world's people? Perhaps, but it's a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express causation and feelings and personal responsibility, hence in how they shape our thoughts. There's no single purpose "best" language; instead, different languages are better suited for different purposes. For instance, it may not have been an accident that Plato and Aristotle wrote in Greek, while Kant wrote in German. The grammatical particles of those two languages, plus their ease in forming compound words, may have helped make them the preeminent languages of western philosophy. Another example, familiar to all of us who studied Latin, is that highly inflected languages (ones in which word endings suffice to indicate sentence structure) can use variations of word order to convey nuances impossible with English. Our English word order is severely constrained by having to serve as the main clue to sentence structure. If English becomes a world language, that won't be because English was necessarily the best language for diplomacy.

And Ross again knew himself to be happy-in a new and less ephemeral way than before. He was filled with a queer sense of enlightnment. It seemed to him that all his life had moved to this pinpoint of time down the scattered threads of twenty years; from his old childhood running thoughtless and barefoot in the sun on Hendrawna sands, from Demelza's birth in the squarlor of a mining cottage, from the plains of Virginia and the trampled fairgrounds of Redruth, from the complex impulses which had governed Elizabeth's choice of Francis and from the simple philosophies of Demelza's own faith, all had been animated to a common end-and that end a moment of enlightenment and understanding and completion. Someone--a Latin poet--had defined eternity as no more than this: to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come. He thought: if we could only stop here. Not when we get home, not leaving Trenwith, but here, here reaching the top of the hill out of Sawle, dusk wiping out the edges of the land and Demelza walking and humming at my side.

Dance is that delicacy of life radiating every particle of our existence with happiness.

Burdened no more is soul for whom life flows through dance and not breath.

I gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not been to make us good and wise, but learned. And it has succeeded. It has not taught us to seek virtue and to embrace wisdom: it has impressed upon us their derivation and their etymology … We readily inquire, ‘Does he know Greek or Latin?’ ‘Can he write poetry and prose?’ But what matters most is what we put last: ‘Has he become better and wiser?’ We ought to find out not who understands most but who understands best. We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong empty.

Transcend the terrestrial; surpass the celestial, from nature’s hands when you receive the sublime pleasures of dance.

Hypotheses non fingo (Latin for "I feign no hypotheses", "I frame no hypotheses", or "I contrive no hypotheses")

But this discourse, expressed in our paternal language, keeps clear the meaning of its words. The very quality of speech and of the Egyptian words have in themselves the energy of the object they speak of. Therefore, my king, in so far as you have the power (who are all powerful), keep the discourse uninterpreted, lest mysteries of such greatness come to the Greeks, lest the extravagant, flaccid and (as it were) dandified Greek idiom extinguish something stately and concise, the energetic idiom of usage. For the Greeks have empty speeches, O king, that are energetic only in what they demonstrate, and this is the philosophy of the Greeks, an inane foolosophy of speeches. We, by contrast, use not speeches but sounds that are full of action. (Chapter XVI)

Utinam tam facile vera invenire possim quam falsa convincere.

When a dancer performs, melody transforms into a carriage, expressions turn into fuel and spirit experiences a journey to a world where passion attains fulfillment.

Make dance the mission every moment seeks to accomplish.

The constant steaming in of thoughts of others must suppress and confine our own and indeed in the long run paralyze the power of thought… The inclination of most scholars is a kind of fuga vacui ( latin for vacuum suction )from the poverty of their own mind , which forcibly draws in the thoughts of others… It is dangerous to read about a subject before we have thought about it ourselves… When we read, another person thinks for us; merely repeat his mental process. So it comes about that if anybody spends almost the whole day in reading, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking. Experience of the world may be looked upon as a kind of text, to which reflection and knowledge form the commentary. Where there is a great deal of reflection and intellectual knowledge and very little experience , the result is like those books which have on each page two lines of text to forty lines of commentary

I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn't stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the result I have a teaching certificate for Latin and Hungarian for the lower classes of the gymnasium, for kids from 10 to 14. I never made use of this teaching certificate. And then I came to philosophy, physics, and mathematics. In fact, I came to mathematics indirectly. I was really more interested in physics and philosophy and thought about those. It is a little shortened but not quite wrong to say: I thought I am not good enough for physics and I am too good for philosophy. Mathematics is in between.

Whatever comes, we let it be as it is. When we do this, we come to see, in this moment or the next, our emotions always moving. The word emotion has its roots in the Latin movere and emovere meaning "to move through" and "to move out". Our emotions move in us, move through us and move between us.And when we allows them to move freely, they change, perhaps scarcely and perhaps gradually - but inevitably. This is grief's most piercing message: there is no way arounf - the only way in through.

It never occurs to most of us .. that the question 'what is the truth' is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like the Latin language or the Law.

Your see, it is no ordinary task. If you translate, say, the Summa of St. Thomas, you expect to be cross-examined by people who understand philosophy and by people who understand Latin; no one else. If you translate the Bible, you are liable to be cross-examined by anybody; because everybody thinks he knows already what the Bible means.

Spirit is a child, the tune of dancing feet its lullaby.

Burdened no more is soul for whom life flows through dance like breath.

I can't believe I spent 13 years at school and never got taught cooking, gardening, conversation, massage, Latin, or philosophy. What were they thinking? That I would somehow live off inorganic chemistry?

Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely. He chose a single word from that language for his device: caute – ‘be cautious’ – inscribed beneath a rose, the symbol of secrecy. For, having chosen to write in a language that was so widely intelligible, he was compelled to hide what he had written.

Eôsphoros, ‘ Εωσφορος’ (pronunciation: eh-aw-s- fOR-aw s) is the Greek name for the Latin Lucifer, ‘Dawn Bringer’; the planet Venus was known by this name along with Hesperos ‘Ἑσπερος’, known in Latin as Vesperus, ‘Evening Star’.

IN ENGLISH, words of Latin origin tend to carry overtones of intellectual, moral and aesthetic “classiness"—overtones which are not carried, as a rule, by their Anglo-Saxon equivalents. “Maternal,” for instance, means the same as “motherly,” “intoxicated” as “drunk”—but with what subtly important shades of difference! And when Shakespeare needed a name for a comic character, it was Sir Toby Belch that he chose, not Cavalier Tobias Eructation.

Anyone who pretends to "understand" Latin America is a fool.

Limit not to only five, when the divine gifts the supreme sixth; the sense of dance

Never out of the fight. I believe in this life philosophy so much that I have it tattooed on my arm in Latin. Numquam Proelia Derelinquam. It needs no interpretation.

Leibniz invented the term “theodicy” (in its French and Latin forms) to mean the justification of God’s ways to man—or, as an unbeliever might put it, the art of making excuses on behalf of God. Among

There are many arts and sciences of which a miner should not be ignorant. First there is Philosophy, that he may discern the origin, cause, and nature of subterranean things; for then he will be able to dig out the veins easily and advantageously, and to obtain more abundant results from his mining. Secondly there is Medicine, that he may be able to look after his diggers and other workman ... Thirdly follows astronomy, that he may know the divisions of the heavens and from them judge the directions of the veins. Fourthly, there is the science of Surveying that he may be able to estimate how deep a shaft should be sunk ... Fifthly, his knowledge of Arithmetical Science should be such that he may calculate the cost to be incurred in the machinery and the working of the mine. Sixthly, his learning must comprise Architecture, that he himself may construct the various machines and timber work required underground ... Next, he must have knowledge of Drawing, that he can draw plans of his machinery. Lastly, there is the Law, especially that dealing with metals, that he may claim his own rights, that he may undertake the duty of giving others his opinion on legal matters, that he may not take another man's property and so make trouble for himself, and that he may fulfil his obligations to others according to the law.

Audience of angels descend in the ambiance reciting praises in your glory, when you wear your dance shoes, when you arrive at the stage and with every step you take beneath your feet heaven moves. That is the power of dance.

In this way we shall arrive at the true end of man, happiness, through having attained the one and only good thing in life, the ideal or goal called arete in Greek and in Latin virtus – for which the English word ‘virtue’ is so unsatisfactory a translation. This, the summum bonum or ‘supreme ideal’, is usually summarized in ancient philosophy as a combination of four qualities: wisdom (or moral insight), courage, self-control and justice (or upright dealing).

Let us now turn for a moment to the word karman which has been cited above. The meanings of the verbal root kar, present also in the Latin creare and the Greek κραίνω [kraino], are to make, do, and effect. And significantly, just as the Latin facere is originally sacra facere, literally “make sacred,” and as the Greek πoιέω = ἱερoπoιέω [poieo = hieropoieo], so karman is originally and very often not merely “work” or “making,” but synonymous with yajna, “sacrifice” and also with vrata, “sacred operation,” “obedience,” “sphere of activity,” “function,” and especially as in the Bhagavad Gita, with dharma, “justice” or “natural law.” In other words, the idea is deeply rooted in our humanity that there is no real distinction of work from holy works, and no necessary opposition of profane to sacred activities. And it is precisely this idea that finds such vivid expression in the well-known Indian philosophy of action, the “Way of Works” (karmamarga) of the Bhagavad Gita.

Don't forget that computer programming teaches students to think," says a friend of mine who's a computer jock in Silicon valley. He's deeply invested in technology and has no kids. "Programming is a logical system that rewards clear reasoning." Uh, sure. Nineteenth-century schoolmasters used the same reasoning to justify teaching ancient languages. According to computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, "There is, so far as I know, no more evidence that programming is good for the mind than Latin is.

Common-Law judges sometimes talk about the law, and schoolmasters talk about the latin tongue, in a way to make their hearers think they mean entities pre-existent to the decisions or the words and syntax, determining them unequivocally and requiring them to obey. But the slightest exercise of reflection makes us see that, instead of being principles of this kind, both law and latin are results. [...] Truth grafts itself on previous truth, modifying it in the process, just as idiom grafts itself on previous idiom, and law on previous law.

The nature of the Hebrew Bible and traditional Judaism, if we insist upon using Latin terms, is orthoprax, which literally means correct practice, implying that Biblical religion and traditional Talmudic Judaism demand right behavior (ethically and ritually) but no formal theological dogma.

This means that he was a monist, believing that there is only one kind of substance in the universe, and an idealist, believing that this single substance is mind, or thought, rather than matter.   Berkeley’s position is often summarized by the Latin phrase esseest percipi (“to be is to be perceived”), but

However, medieval Islam did not display interest in all aspects of Greco-Roman civilization: Islam remained inimical to classical art, drama, and narrative. Moreover, as we saw in chapter 1, during the early Muslim conquests there was a conscious destruction of the monuments of the pre-Islamic past. And in Spain, historian al-Andalusi tells us that such rulers as the Umayyad Abd Allah (888–912) and the dictator Muhammad Ibn Abu Amir al-Mansur (c. 938–1002, known to Christians as Almanzor) had precious books of ancient Greek and Latin poetry, lexicography, history, philosophy and law burned for their presumably impious content.

Even after the Hellenistic empire of Alexander’s successors was supplanted by that of the Latin-speaking Romans, the usual linguistic development – the language of the empire imposing itself on cultural activities – did not take place, and even philosophers whose mother tongue was not Greek did philosophy not in Latin but in Greek.

Saudade is presented as the key feeling of the Portuguese soul. The word comes from the Latin plural solitates, “solitudes,” but its derivation was influenced by the idea and sonority of the Latin salvus, “in good health,” “safe.” A long tradition that goes back to the origins of Lusophone language, to the thirteenth-century cantiga d’amigo, has repeatedly explored, in literature and philosophy, the special feeling of a people that has always looked beyond its transatlantic horizons. Drawn from a genuine suffering of the soul, saudade became, for philosophical speculation, particularly suitable for expressing the relationship of the human condition to temporality, finitude, and the infinite.

Classics is, to me, the unicycle of education. It isn’t especially practical or useful to learn Ancient History. It isn’t necessary to learn Latin, or to read Virgil, however much it helps your spelling. It won’t get you a well-paid job in a fancy office, and it won’t necessarily make you attractive to the opposite sex (maybe just to the really good people). But none of that is important compared with the simple fact that studying Classics is brilliant. It’s terrific to know an alphabet you didn’t learn as a five-year-old. It’s amazing to learn about a world far away from your own. It’s wonderful to find a whole new world of literature, history, art, architecture, religion, philosophy, politics and society.

Latin, Arithmetic, Grammar, all were locked up for an hour in the dingy schoolroom. The teacher might be a noun if he wished, and a proper one at that, but they meant to enjoy themselves. As long as skating was as perfect as this, it made no difference whether Holland were on the North Pole or the Equator; and, as for Philosophy, how could they bother themselves about inertia and gravitation and such things, when it was as much as they could do to keep from getting knocked over in the commotion.

For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment (by which fastned to the seat of the Soveraignty, every joynt and member is moved to performe his duty) are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body Naturall; The Wealth and Riches of all the particular members, are the Strength; Salus Populi (the Peoples Safety) its Businesse; Counsellors, by whom all things needfull for it to know, are suggested unto it, are the Memory; Equity and Lawes, an artificiall Reason and Will; Concord, Health; Sedition, Sicknesse; and Civill War, Death.

The Honeywell girls knew Latin and Greek, European languages and history, philosophy and economics, and even a smattering of biology (scandalous indeed). Alice, Astrid’s younger sister by three years, excelled at maths, of all things, and helped Astrid keep the estate books in order. Ardyce and Antonia, the two youngest, liked to chatter to each other in ancient Greek and reenact scenes from Homeric epics in the stable yard. Astrid, unsurprisingly, enjoyed spouting political theory the most, and had firm opinions on the matter of women’s place in society. She was a bluestocking and proud of it.

For the ancient world, then, apart from reviving philosophy in Latin literature, he ‘spiritualized and humanized’36 Stoicism. What of Seneca and modern philosophy? The latter, at least in the universities of the English-speaking world, has for some time been set on a course which he would certainly have condemned; he would not have understood the attention it pays to ordinary language, and some of his letters (for example letter XLVIII) make it clear that it would have come in for a share of his impatience with philosophers (not excluding Stoics) who in his eyes degraded philosophy by wasting their time on verbal puzzles or logical hairsplitting.

Two great contemporary scholars at the antipodes of the cultural spread of Hellenism, Boethius in Rome (d. 525) and Sergius of Re¯ˇsayna in northern Mesopotamia ¯ (d. 536), conceived of the grand idea of translating all of Aristotle into Latin and Syriac respectively.5 The conception is to their credit as individual thinkers for their noble intentions; their failure indicates that the receiving cultures in which they worked had not developed the need for this enterprise. Philosophy in Latin was to develop, even if on some of the foundations laid by Boethius, much later,6 while in Syriac it reached its highest point with BarHebraeus in the thirteenth century only after it had developed in Arabic and was translated from it.

Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray. Kabir That this insight into the nature of things and the origin of good and evil is not confined exclusively to the saint, but is recognized obscurely by every human being, is proved by the very structure of our language. For language, as Richard Trench pointed out long ago, is often “wiser, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but have been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse of in a happy moment of divination.” For example, how significant it is that in the Indo-European languages, as Darmsteter has pointed out, the root meaning “two” should connote badness. The Greek prefix dys- (as in dyspepsia) and the Latin dis- (as in dishonorable) are both derived from “duo.” The cognate bis- gives a pejorative sense to such modern French words as bévue (“blunder,” literally “two-sight”). Traces of that “second which leads you astray” can be found in “dubious,” “doubt” and Zweifel—for to doubt is to be double-minded. Bunyan has his Mr. Facing-both-ways, and modern American slang its “two-timers.” Obscurely and unconsciously wise, our language confirms the findings of the mystics and proclaims the essential badness of division—a word, incidentally, in which our old enemy “two” makes another decisive appearance.

A citizen of the United States, means a member of this new nation. The principle of government being radically changed by the revolution, the political character of the people was also changed from subjects to citizens. The difference is immense. Subject is derived from the latin word 'sub' and 'jacio', and means one who is under the power of another; but a citizen is an unit of mass of free people, who, collectively, possess sovereignty . Subjects look up to a master, but citizens are so far equal, that none have hereditary rights superior to others. Each citizen of a free state contains, within himself, by nature and constitution, as much of the common sovereignty as another. In the eye of reason and philosophy, the political condition of citizens is more exalted than that of noblemen. Dukes and earls are the features of kings, and may be made by them at pleasure; but citizens possess in their own right original sovereignty.

A Spinoza in poetry becomes a Machiavelli in philosophy. Mysticism is the scholastic of the heart, the dialectic of the feelings. So long as our scholastic education takes us back to antiquity and furthers the study of the Greek and Latin languages, we may congratulate ourselves that these studies, so necessary for the higher culture, will never disappear. If we set our gaze on antiquity and earnestly study it, in the desire to form ourselves thereon, we get the feeling as if it were only then that we really became men. The pedagogue, in trying to write and speak Latin, has a higher and grander idea of himself than would be permissible in ordinary life. If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature. The classical is health; and the romantic, disease. When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art. For all other Arts we must make some allowance; but to Greek Art alone we are always debtors. The dignity of Art appears perhaps most conspicuously in Music; for in Music there is no material to be deducted. It is wholly form and intrinsic value, and it raises and ennobles all that it expresses. Art rests upon a kind of religious sense: it is deeply and ineradicably in earnest. Thus it is that Art so willingly goes hand in hand with Religion. Art is essentially noble; therefore the artist has nothing to fear from a low or common subject. Nay, by taking it up, he ennobles it; and so it is that we see the greatest artists boldly exercising their sovereign rights. Ignorant people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago. To praise a man is to put oneself on his level. In science it is a service of the highest merit to seek out those fragmentary truths attained by the ancients, and to develop them further.

All Corpo universities were to have the same curriculum, entirely practical and modern, free of all snobbish tradition. Entirely omitted were Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Biblical study, archaeology, philology; all history before 1500—except for one course which showed that, through the centuries, the key to civilization had been the defense of Anglo-Saxon purity against barbarians. Philosophy and its history, psychology, economics, anthropology were retained, but, to avoid the superstitious errors in ordinary textbooks, they were to be conned only in new books prepared by able young scholars under the direction of Dr. Macgoblin. Students were encouraged to read, speak, and try to write modern languages, but they were not to waste their time on the so-called “literature"; reprints from recent newspapers were used instead of antiquated fiction and sentimental poetry. As regards English, some study of literature was permitted, to supply quotations for political speeches, but the chief courses were in advertising, party journalism, and business correspondence, and no authors before 1800 might be mentioned, except Shakespeare and Milton.

The round, unformed script on the fly-leaf said, Francis Crawford of Lymond. She stared at it; then put it down and picked up another. The writing in this one was older; the neat level hand she had seen once before, in Stamboul. This time it said only, The Master of Culter. That dated it after the death of his father, when until the birth of Richard’s son Kevin, the heir’s rank and title were Lymond’s. And all the books were his, too. She scanned them: some works in English; others in Latin and Greek, French, Italian and Spanish.… Prose and verse. The classics, pressed together with folios on the sciences, theology, history; bawdy epistles and dramas; books on war and philosophy; the great legends. Sheets and volumes and manuscripts of unprinted music. Erasmus and St Augustine, Cicero, Terence and Ptolemy, Froissart and Barbour and Dunbar; Machiavelli and Rabelais, Bude and Bellenden, Aristotle and Copernicus, Duns Scotus and Seneca. Gathered over the years; added to on infrequent visits; the evidence of one man’s eclectic taste. And if one studied it, the private labyrinth, book upon book, from which the child Francis Crawford had emerged, contained, formidable, decorative as his deliberate writing, as the Master of Culter.

One of Castro’s first acts as Cuba’s Prime Minister was to go on a diplomatic tour that started on April 15, 1959. His first stop was the United States, where he met with Vice President Nixon, after having been snubbed by President Eisenhower, who thought it more important to go golfing than to encourage friendly relations with a neighboring country. It seemed that the U.S. Administration did not take the new Cuban Prime Minister seriously after he showed up dressed in revolutionary garb. Delegating his Vice President to meet the new Cuban leader was an obvious rebuff. However, what was worse was that an instant dislike developed between the two men, when Fidel Castro met Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon. This dislike was amplified when Nixon openly badgered Castro with anti-communistic rhetoric. Once again, Castro explained that he was not a Communist and that he was with the West in the Cold War. However, during this period following the McCarthy era, Nixon was not listening. During Castro’s tour to the United States, Canada and Latin America, everyone in Cuba listened intently to what he had to say. Fidel’s speeches, that were shown on Cuban television, were troubling to Raúl and he feared that his brother was deviating from Cuba’s path towards communism. Becoming concerned by Fidel’s candid remarks, Raúl conferred with his close friend “Che” Guevara, and finally called Fidel about how he was being perceived in Cuba. Following this conversation, Raúl flew to Texas where he met with his brother Fidel in Houston. Raúl informed him that the Cuban press saw his diplomacy as a concession to the United States. The two brothers argued openly at the airport and again later at the posh Houston Shamrock Hotel, where they stayed. With the pressure on Fidel to embrace Communism he reluctantly agreed…. In time he whole heartily accepted Communism as the philosophy for the Cuban Government.

Now, in Scribner's window, I saw a book called The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. I went inside, and took it off the shelf, and looked at the table of contents and at the title page which was deceptive, because it said the book was made up of a series of lectures that had been given at the University of Aberdeen. That was no recommendation, to me especially. But it threw me off the track as to the possible identity and character of Etienne Gilson, who wrote the book. I bought it, then, together with one other book that I have completely forgotten, and on my way home in the Long Island train, I unwrapped the package to gloat over my acquisitions. It was only then that I saw, on the first page of The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, the small print which said: "Nihil Obstat ... Imprimatur." The feeling of disgust and deception struck me like a knife in the pit of the stomach. I felt as if I had been cheated! They should have warned me that it was a Catholic book! Then I would never have bought it. As it was, I was tempted to throw the thing out the window at the houses of Woodside -- to get rid of it as something dangerous and unclean. Such is the terror that is aroused in the enlightened modern mind by a little innocent Latin and the signature of a priest. It is impossible to communicate, to a Catholic, the number and complexity of fearful associations that a little thing like this can carry with it. It is in Latin -- a difficult, ancient and obscure tongue. That implies, to the mind that has roots in Protestantism, all kinds of sinister secrets, which the priests are supposed to cherish and to conceal from common men in this unknown language. Then, the mere fact that they should pass judgement on the character of a book, and permit people to read it: that in itself is fraught with terror. It immediately conjures up all the real and imaginary excesses of the Inquisition. That is something of what I felt when I opened Gilson's book: for you must understand that while I admired Catholic culture, I had always been afraid of the Catholic Church. That is a rather common position in the world today. After all, I had not bought a book on medieval philosophy without realizing that it would be Catholic philosophy: but the imprimatur told me that what I read would be in full conformity with that fearsome and mysterious thing, Catholic Dogma, and the fact struck me with an impact against which everything in me reacted with repugnance and fear. Now, in light of all this, I consider that it was surely a real grace that, instead of getting rid of the book, I actually read it. The result was that I at once acquired an immense respect for Catholic philosophy and for the Catholic faith. And that last thing was the most important of all.

As Arab armies conquered Syria (which had been part of the Roman and Byzantine empires), they found Syriac translations of Greek philosophical works. These writings were translated into Arabic, and for a time they became the foundation of Muslim philosophy. Eventually, they were rejected as being inconsistent with Islam. The mullahs decided that Muslims could accept practical works from the conquered people, but speculative thought was out. Christians, however, had long since made their peace with integrating pagan philosophy with the Bible. In fact, since the time of the early Christian writers, theologians had argued that just as the Hebrew prophets were the Jewish world’s road to the truth best expressed in Christianity, philosophers were the pagan world’s road to that same truth. So when Christian scholars found out about the works of Aristotle in Spain, they began to translate them into Latin, the language of the church and of scholarship. These new texts immediately caused a buzz in the scholarly community, because here was a complete, well-developed worldview that answered all of the key philosophical questions that medieval scholars had grappled with. The only question was how to integrate the “New Aristotle” into the intellectual synthesis already in place with the advent of Platonic humanism.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. As intellectually gifted as he was aristocratic (he was actually Prince della Mirandola), Pico read not only Greek and Latin, but Hebrew and Arabic. Although only in his twenties, he had studied science and mathematics as well as literature and philosophy. He was as much at home with the medieval scholastics as with the wisdom of the ancients. Historians have labeled several scholars in the Renaissance as being “the last man to know everything,” including Erasmus and Francis Bacon. Giovanni Pico is the true owner of the title. His staggering range of interests and his inexhaustible scholarly energy were aimed at a single mission. This was to prove that all religions and philosophies, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, actually formed a single body of knowledge. On the surface, Plato and Aristotle, Hebrew, Islamic, and Christian theologies, seemed hard to reconcile. But underneath them all, Pico argued, was a shared set of universal truths handed down over the centuries to certain great wise men, who then passed them along to their successors.

God is inside us all, and everyone can find his transcendent inner light and undergo the ultimate metamorphosis. We are like larvae, awaiting the moment when we emerge as our true selves. Larva means “ghost” in Latin; we haunt the world as something incomplete and primitive before we find the means to liberate our divine spark and assume our true form, like the most radiant and colourful of butterflies.

Whatever comes, we let it be as it is. When we do this, we come to see, in this moment or the next, our emotions always moving. The word emotion has its roots in the Latin movere and emovere meaning "to move through" and "to move out." Our emotions move in us, move through us and move between us. And when we allow them to move freely, they change, perhaps scarcely and perhaps gradually - but inevitably. This is grief's piercing message: there is no way around - the only way is through.

Husserl had picked up this idea from his old teacher Franz Brentano, in Vienna days. In a fleeting paragraph of his book Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano proposed that we approach the mind in terms of its ‘intentions’ — a misleading word, which sounds like it means deliberate purposes. Instead it meant a general reaching or stretching, from the Latin root in-tend, meaning to stretch towards or into something. For Brentano, this reaching towards objects is what our minds do all the time. Our thoughts are invariably of or about something, he wrote: in love, something is loved, in hatred, something is hated, in judgement, something is affirmed or denied. Even when I imagine an object that isn’t there, my mental structure is still one of ‘about-ness’ or ‘of-ness’. If I dream that a white rabbit runs past me checking its pocket watch, I am dreaming of my fantastical dream-rabbit. If I gaze up at the ceiling trying to make sense of the structure of consciousness, I am thinking about the structure of consciousness. Except in deepest sleep, my mind is always engaged in this aboutness: it has ‘intentionality’. Having taken the germ of this from Brentano, Husserl made it central to his whole philosophy. Just try it: if you attempt to sit for two minutes and think about nothing, you will probably get an inkling of why intentionality is so fundamental to human existence. The mind races around like a foraging squirrel in a park, grabbing in turn at a flashing phone screen, a distant mark on the wall, a clink of cups, a cloud that resembles a whale, a memory of something a friend said yesterday, a twinge in a knee, a pressing deadline, a vague expectation of nice weather later, a tick of the clock. Some Eastern meditation techniques aim to still this scurrying creature, but the extreme difficulty of this shows how unnatural it is to be mentally inert. Left to itself, the mind reaches out in all directions as long as it is awake — and even carries on doing it in the dreaming phase of its sleep. Understood in this way, the mind hardly is anything at all: it is its aboutness. This makes the human mind (and possibly some animal minds) different from any other naturally occurring entity. Nothing else can be as thoroughly about or of things as the mind is: even a book only reveals what it’s ‘about’ to someone who picks it up and peruses it, and is otherwise merely a storage device. But a mind that is experiencing nothing, imagining nothing, or speculating about nothing can hardly be said to be a mind at all.

Tómate en serio, mujer. Recorre tus caminos interiores, tus sendas prohibidas, rasga tus vestiduras. abre tus heridas, exhibe tus miserias, ostenta tus arrugas, tus carnes flácidas, las redondeces conspicuas. Pierde todas las formas, inventa la tuya. La forma auténtica es tu libertad. Alcanza la rebelión de la feminista, como decimos las maestras del arte de envejecer: la edad no es un secreto vergonzoso. Piensa en la alternativa: la muerte

Different cultures have different systems for learning in part because of the philosophers who influenced the approach to intellectual life in general and science in particular. Although Aristotle, a Greek, is credited with articulating applications-first thinking (induction), it was British thinkers, including Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century and Francis Bacon in the sixteenth century, who popularized these methodologies among modern scholars and scientists. Later, Americans, with their pioneer mentality and disinclination toward theoretical learning, came to be even more applications-first than the British. By contrast, philosophy on the European continent has been largely driven by principles-first approaches. In the seventeenth century, Frenchman René Descartes spelled out a method of principles-first reasoning in which the scientist first formulates a hypothesis, then seeks evidence to prove or disprove it. Descartes was deeply skeptical of data based on mere observation and sought a deeper understanding of underlying principles. In the nineteenth century, the German Friedrich Hegel introduced the dialectic model of deduction, which reigns supreme in schools in Latin and Germanic countries. The Hegelian dialectic begins with a thesis, or foundational argument; this is opposed by an antithesis, or conflicting argument; and the two are then reconciled in a synthesis.

Calvinist Holland saw them as Jews, while Jews saw them as Christians. They studied Hebrew, spoke Spanish or Portuguese, wrote in Latin and lived in a cosmopolitan world. They saw Judaism not as a closed world but rather as a laboratory and a crossroads of experiences. Out of this background, Spinoza elaborated a philosophy of immanence that went beyond both Judaism and Christianity. Inevitably, this champion of the Enlightenment was accused of heresy and banished from the Jewish community.17 The messianic hope was then rethought in a secular perspective of political emancipation (Menasseh ben Israel), reformulated as subversive apostasy (Sabbati Tsvi) or as a ‘messianism of reason’ (Spinoza).

Most of the philosophers of the seventeenth century hovered somewhere in between. Most were prepared to accept the evidence of their senses as possibly flawed and easily misled but nevertheless the only handle we have on reality. (This is known as “sensationalism.”) Then there was the certainty of the knowing, reasoning person himself. What if, asked Descartes, “I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it follow from that that I, too, do not exist?” No, he answered—because “if I have convinced myself of something then I must certainly exist.” From this he concluded “that this proposition I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived by my mind.”24 This form of reasoning, which was subsequently turned into the famous Latin phrase Cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am”—became one of the touchstones of the new philosophy. Not many Skeptics went so far as to doubt the existence of the world. But Descartes’s point is much the same as both Montaigne’s and John Donne’s: The only things of which I can be certain must come directly from the individual in his or her immediate and direct contact with the external world. The implications for the traditional Christian view of the world of even a moderate form of this kind of skeptical reasoning could be devastating.

These linguistic structural factors explain the notorious inability of even genius to translate a poem from one language to another, except very approximately. They may also explain some of the great conflicts in the history of philosophy — Prof. Hugh Kenner has wittily argued that Descartes, thinking in a French even more latinate than today's, would perceive un pomme grosse et rouge and conclude that the mind starts from general ideas and then discovers particulars, whereas Locke, thinking in English, would perceive the same sort of space-time event as a big red apple and decide that the mind starts from particulars and then assembles general ideas.

To his audience at John Flaxman’s home Taylor spoke of Orpheus, Hermes, Zoroaster and the ‘perennial philosophy’, the ‘primal wisdom’ of the ancients which Plato had imbibed from the sages who preceded him. Taylor was a one-man Platonic Academy, doing for the esoteric intelligentsia of late eighteenth century London what Marsilio Ficino did for the artists and poets of Renaissance Florence, with his Latin translations of the lost books of Plato and the Hermetica.55 Taylor believed that this primal wisdom was ‘coeval with the universe itself; and however its continuity may be broken by opposing systems, it will make its appearance at different periods of time, as long as the sun himself shall continue to illumine the world’.

Endowed with the infinite attributes of Thought and Extension, Spinoza’s God is identical with the active, generative aspects of nature. In an infamous phrase that appeared in the Latin but not in the more accessible Dutch edition of the work, Spinoza refers to Deus sive Natura, “God or Nature.”8 “By God,” he says in one of the opening definitions of Part I, “I understand a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.” In other words, God is the universal, immanent system of causal principles or natures that gives Nature its ultimate unity.

The dictatorship of the Church over men's minds was shattered; it was directly cast off by the majority of the Germanic peoples, who adopted Protestantism, while among the Latins a cheerful spirit of free thought, taken over from the Arabs and nourished by the newly-discovered Greek philosophy, took root more and more and prepared the way for the materialism of the eighteenth century.

The name ‘Philos’ comes from Greek, signifying friend or lover. ‘Fable’ has its roots in Latin, meaning story or tale, while ‘Wright’ hails from Old English, symbolising craftsman or maker.

Kabbalah (in Hebrew, literally “receiving”) refers to the mystical traditions that encompass the secrets of the Torah, the esoteric truths that reveal the most profound understanding of the world, of humankind, and of the Almighty himself. Philo was a Jewish mystic in Alexandria, Egypt, who wrote dissertations on the Kabbalah in the first century of the Christian era. He is commonly considered the central link between Greek philosophy, Judaism, and Christian mysticism. His triangles point either up or down to show the flow of energy between action and reception, male and female, God and humanity, and the upper and lower worlds. In fact, the Latin name for this kind of mosaic decor is opus alexandrinum (Alexandrian work) because it is filled with Kabbalistic symbolism originally taught by Philo of Alexandria.

Few exchanges in the history of science have leaped so boldly into the future as this one, which occurred a thousand years ago in a region now often dismissed as a backwater and valued mainly for its natural resources, not its intellectual achievements. We know of it because copies survived in manuscript and were published almost a millennium later. Twenty-eight-year-old Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, or simply Biruni (973–1048), hailed from near the Aral Sea and went on to distinguish himself in geography, mathematics, trigonometry, comparative religion, astronomy, physics, geology, psychology, mineralogy, and pharmacology. His younger counterpart, Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina, or just Ibn Sina (ca. 980–1037), grew up in the stately city of Bukhara, the great seat of learning in what is now Uzbekistan. He was to make his mark in medicine, philosophy, physics, chemistry, astronomy, theology, clinical pharmacology, physiology, ethics, and music theory. When eventually Ibn Sina’s magisterial Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin, it triggered the start of modern medicine in the West and became its Bible: a dozen editions were printed before 1500. Indians used Ibn Sina’s Canon to develop a whole school of medicine that continues today. Many regard Biruni and Ibn Sina together as the greatest scientific minds between antiquity and the Renaissance, if not the modern age.

C'est au Moyen Âge, à la faveur d'un assez extraordinaire jeu de mots (malum signifiant à la fois "le mal" et "la pomme" en latin) que le fruit défendu du jardin d'Eden et croqué à belles dents par Adam et Eve, fut assimilé à une pomme.

There are enough unresolved metaphysical problems in the Categories and the Isagoge (a brilliantly unsuccessful attempt to defuse these problems) to make a logic curriculum based on these works a path to questions in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. Similarly, the De interpretatione, as presented by Boethius’s long commentary (heavily based on Porphyry’s lost work), opens up the philosophy of language.9 In addition to logic, grammar also provided opportunities for philosophizing, in two distinct ways (see Chapter 15). First, the textbook for the advanced study of grammar was the Institutions, written by Priscian in the early sixth century. Priscian was influenced by Stoic linguistic theory and, though most of the work is about the particularities of Latin, some passages raise issues in semantics that were taken up by medieval readers, especially by eleventh- and twelfthcentury readers familiar with the Aristotelian semantics of De interpretatione. Second, ancient Latin texts were studied as part of grammar. They included not only poetry (Virgil, Ovid, Lucan), but also a quartet of philosophical works: Plato’s Timaeus in Calcidius’s partial translation, along with his commentary; Martianus Capella’s On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury, which prefaces its encyclopedic treatment of the liberal arts with an allegorical account of an ascent by learning to heaven; Macrobius’s commentary on The Dream of Scipio (the last book of Cicero’s Republic), which combines astronomy, political philosophy, and an account of some Platonic doctrines; and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy – the work of a Christian written, however, without recourse to revelation and as a philosophical argument, drawing on Stoic ethics and Neoplatonic epistemology and metaphysics

Charlemagne was intimately involved in the new interest in philosophy in his court. One of the earliest, in-part philosophical texts was issued as if it were by Charlemagne himself, no less: the Work of King Charles against the Synod (known also as the Libri Carolini) – the Latin response to the Greek position on image worship.2 Charlemagne’s leading court intellectual, Alcuin, depicts the king as his pupil, being instructed in logic and rhetoric in two of Alcuin’s didactic dialogues. One of these, On Dialectic, is the first medieval logical textbook. Of course, Charlemagne’s authorship and participation in classroom instruction represent not realities, but an ideology: that of royal approval for logic especially, both as a tool for understanding Christian doctrine and as a weapon in religious controversy

Ultimately, beyond the primordial, brutish labels of man-made institutions, true practical religion of the civilized society must bring oneness. This very process of unification without bigotry is what makes religion, religion, for the word religion comes from the latin "religare", which means "to bind", that is to unify humanity.

Lieutenant Fielding was a relatively young teacher who taught Latin and Greek History. He was friendlier than most teachers and encouraged his students to come back to his classroom after hours for additional insight. I remember him professing that the Greeks placed great emphasis on the human body, especially that of men. He also explained that students and teachers should develop a very special bond, supposedly for their enhanced mutual benefit. His philosophy was based on Pederasty as it was practiced in Ancient Greece and, for Fielding; it provided an entrance into a form of ritualistic military life, and the religion of Zeus. At the time I had no inkling what he was talking about, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that he was “gay,” a term not used at the time. However, some students didn’t mind his advances and got unusually high grades, until one day he left without notice. Some of those students who received the extra help were either pulled out of school by their parents or asked to leave by the school’s administrators. In 1952 there was little tolerance for the alternate life style that Lieutenant Fielding was promoting!

During Castro’s tour to the United States, Canada and Latin America, everyone in Cuba listened intently to what he was saying. Fidel’s speeches, that were shown on Cuban television, were troubling to Raúl and he feared that his brother was deviating from Cuba’s path towards communism. Becoming concerned by Fidel’s candid remarks, Raúl conferred with his close friend “Che” Guevara, and finally called Fidel about how he was being perceived in Cuba. Following this conversation, Raúl flew to Texas where he met with his brother Fidel in Houston. Raúl informed him that the Cuban press saw his diplomacy as a concession to the United States. The two brothers argued openly at the airport and again later at the posh Houston Shamrock Hotel, where they stayed. During a heated discussion that was overheard by a number of other guests at the hotel, Fidel told Raúl that it was all a misunderstanding and that there wasn’t anything for him to worry about. He emphatically emphasized that Raúl’s and “Che’s” thoughts about him were unfounded and that he continued to agree with them on their basic political philosophy. Those who heard the intense argument on the 18th floor of the hotel said that although they could not make out exactly what was being said, it concerned itself with the direction the Castro brothers wanted to take Cuba. Apparently, their differences were resolved that night and Fidel, being the more charismatic of the two, continued his diplomatic tour. However, it was Raúl who kept Fidel’s feet to the fire and got things done.

gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not been to make us good and wise, but learned. And it has succeeded. It has not taught us to seek virtue and to embrace wisdom: it has impressed upon us their derivation and their etymology … We readily inquire, ‘Does he know Greek or Latin?’ ‘Can he write poetry and prose?’ But what matters most is what we put last: ‘Has he become better and wiser?’ We ought to find out not who understands most but who understands best. We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong empty. He

It never occurs to most of us .. that the question 'what is the truth' is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like the Latin language or the Law.

O wayfarer! Yearn finds quench, not in meadows, seashores or altitude of mountain peaks; but when being becomes dance.

The influence of the langues d’oc and d’oïl produced a situation in which French had started exporting itself even before it had become a fully developed language with a coherent writing system. Between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, Romance impressed itself on Europe as the language of worldly business, helping to relegate Latin to the religious sphere, although the latter did remain a language of science and philosophy for many more centuries. In the Mediterranean region, fishermen, sailors and merchants used a rudimentary version of langue d’oc mixed with Italian that people called the lingua franca (“Frankish language”), and over time this spoken language soaked up influences from Italian, Spanish and Turkish. (Today a lingua franca is any common language used in economics, diplomacy or science, in a context where it is not a mother tongue.) The Mediterranean lingua franca never evolved into anyone’s mother tongue, which is why there are very few written traces of it. A rare rendition of it appears in a seventeenth-century comedy by the French playwright Molière, who had been a wandering actor before he entered Louis XIV’s Court. In his Le bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-Be Gentleman), Molière creates the character of a fake Turk who speaks in lingua franca (for obvious comical effect): Se ti sabir, / Ti respondir; se non sabir, / Tazir, Tazir. Mi star Mufti / Ti qui star ti? Non intendir, / Tazir, tazir. If you know, / you must respond. If you don’t know, / you must shut up. I am the Mufti, / who are you? I don’t understand; / shut up, shut up.2 It was the Crusades, which were dominated by the French, that turned lingua franca into the dominant language in the Mediterranean. More than half a dozen Crusades were carried out over nearly three centuries. Many Germans and English also participated, but the Arabs uniformly referred to the Crusaders as Franj, caring little whether they said oc, oïl, ja or yes. Interestingly, Arabic, the language of the common enemy, gave French roughly a thousand terms, including amiral (admiral), alcool (alcohol), coton (cotton) and sirop (syrup). The great prevalence of Arabic words in French scientific language—terms such as algèbre (algebra), alchimie (alchemy) and zéro (zero)—underlines the fact that the Arabs were definitely at the cutting edge of knowledge at the time.

O wayfarer! Yearn finds quench, not in meadows, seashores or altitude of mountain peaks; but when being and dance are one.

So Newton, like all good seventeenth-century intellectuals, wrote in Latin because that was the international language of science, philosophy and, I found out later, upmarket pornography.

Wipe out America, you wipe out innovation. Wipe out India, you wipe out spirituality. Wipe out Latin America, you wipe out liberty. Wipe out Turkiye, you wipe out poetry.

All Roads Lead to Aum (The Sonnet) God needs no man, Because (hu)man is God. God is a mythical lie, Godliness is not. Oneness is Godliness, Godliness is oneness. World without oneness, is a manifestation mindless. Oneness is the Noor, Oneness is Kabbalah. Oneness is Aum, Oneness is Nirvana. All roads lead to Aum, Whether you speak sanskrit, latin or klingon. Light up the noor at the altar of heart, Finally as true sapiens a common ape will dawn.

For Plato, of course, there existed beyond the realm of ordinary sense-experience the world of Forms, for which outward, earthly appearances—including symbols such as language itself—were mere and meager representations. Words were simply incapable of accurately describing or illustrating this divine realm. The logic and reason of the Aristotelians occupied its true home only in the sphere of sense-experience—in what Pletho had nonchalantly dismissed as the world of oysters and embryos. The Aristotelian philosophy on which western Christianity depended therefore offered a misguided point of departure in any quest for inexpressible truths and eternal verities. The clumsy wordings of dogmas, liturgies, creeds: such things were mere shadow puppets on the wall of the Platonic cave; debates framed by Aristotelian philosophy could never hope to approach or capture their proper forms. On the other hand, Plato’s philosophy, with its belief in a unity embracing scattered differences, offered a more promising chance to find a concord between the Greeks and the Latins. Bessarion and Traversari duly worked out a compromise on the fraught question of the Procession of the Holy Spirit. They came up with the argument that since the saints in both the East and West had been inspired by the same Holy Spirit, it scarcely mattered whether this Holy Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son or simply from the Father. It was, after all, merely a matter of semantics—of whether one believed that “from” (εκ) and “through” (διά) meant the same thing. As Bessarion put it in the context of another dispute, the two parties “agreed in substance and differed only in words.

The flaw that I thought most greatly de-legitimized modern Christian theology was the intellectual and moral respect it continued to show modern atheism long after the twentieth century had revealed—and continued to reveal—the violence beating in the heart of programmatic atheism. Was there anything in pro-grammatic atheism’s creatures—National Socialism, Marxist Communism,and Scientificism—that had not revealed itself as tyrannical and vicious? And yet Christian theologians continued to treat atheism with intellectual respect, as if programmatic atheists were modern versions of free-thinkers in French salons (like, e.g., Voltaire). The fact that modern atheism had clearly revealed itself to have more in common with Jean-Paul Marat than with Voltaire was ignored: judgment was never passed. The myth of self-definition of atheist thinkers was taken at face value: each such intellectual was treated as sui-generis—a philosophical freelancer, with no history that needed to be acknowledged and repented of. While even the most independent of any free church Christianity, traditionally anti-Catholic and thus rejecting the history of Christianity prior to the 1860s, was nonetheless regarded as implicated in century old “crimes of Christianity” and denied any status of “freelancing,” atheism was a moral blank slate that could be, and had to be, taken seriously and respected: any atheist had no history that needed to be accounted for. In my eyes the credentialing of pro-grammatic atheism was a deep moral and intellectual failure by modern theologians.

Some overly enthusiastic feminists have suggested a fundamental bias in the word—and in the process it represents—and have enjoyed proclaiming their account of women in the past as herstory. But “history” comes from Middle English histoire, which is exactly the modern French word for both “history” and “story,” and before that from Latin and Greek—all languages in which “his” is not the masculine personal pronoun. But wordplay among contemporary academic theorists works whether or not it’s true, and this is simply a lie.

If the philosophy of the Middle Ages is based on the logic of Aristotle, their science can be traced rather to the Greek thought of pre-Aristotelian times. For authority it relied very largely on a single dialogue of Plato, to which may be added Latin translations of a small part of Hippocrates, and of his post-Christian successor and interpreter, Galen.

Perhaps the most famous and dramatic example of intellectual development in prison is that of Malcolm X.21 Malcolm Little (as he was born) entered prison immersed in drugs, sex, and petty crime. In prison he met a polymath named John Elton Bembry who was steeped in culture and history, able to hold forth on a wide variety of fascinating topics. On his advice Malcolm began to read—first the dictionary, then books on etymology and linguistics. He studied elementary Latin and German. He converted to Islam, a faith introduced to him by his brothers. In the following years he read the Bible and the Qur’an, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, and Kant, as well as works of Asian philosophy. He pored over an especially loved book of the archaeological wonders of the East and the West. He learned the history of colonialism, of slavery, and of African peoples. He felt his old ways of thinking disappear “like snow off of a roof.”22 He filled his letters with verse, writing to his brother: “I’m a real bug for poetry. When you think back over all of our past lives, only poetry could best fit into the vast emptiness created by men.

He gave Blue Origin a coat of arms and a Latin motto, Gradatim Ferociter, which translates to “Step by Step, Ferociously.” The phrase accurately captures Amazon’s guiding philosophy as well. Steady progress toward seemingly impossible goals will win the day. Setbacks are temporary. Naysayers are best ignored.

Before discussing the 'relinking' of people and forests through community forestry, it is important to understand where the 'delinking' paradigm, superimposed onto Tanzania and elsewhere during colonial times originated. The separation of people and nature has deep-rooted conceptual origins, for example early Judeo-Christian texts explicitly framed humans as exceptional and separate from nature as opposed to many animist religions that placed humans within nature. The conceptual separation is particularly strong in Europe, as reflected in the origins of certain words, with the Latin word foestis originating from a meaning 'outside', as in a wild place outside human control. Such 'wild places' later became the hunting reserves of elites in Europe in the form of exclusionary Royal Forests, 'commoners' were kept out. A few centuries later, during the period of Enlightenment and into industrialisation and urbanisation, livelihoods in countries like Britain are further delinked from nature, The division between [eople and nature has become so heavily engrained in modern industrialised society that 'wilderness' has attained a romantic idealisation.

At Woodstock Seminary in Maryland, our philosophy courses are taught in Latin.” “Why is that?” “For precision of thought. It expresses nuances and subtle distinctions that English can’t handle.

The con of contemplation names companionship, though paradoxically templum (Latin) is related to the Greek word témenos (τέμενος), coming from témno (τέμνω), meaning "to cut off.

It’s hard to explain the point of dead languages to people today. Latin, in a pinch, but only for lawyers, theologians, and historians. In purely practical terms, these languages are useless. But their study gave us a profounder understanding of the origins of Western culture, of literature, of philosophy, of the deepest currents of our understanding of the world we live in.

The opening verse of John is probably the most quoted in scripture: In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Unfortunately, it is also the most blatant mistranslation in the whole of the Christian canon. It sounds from the English (and also from the Latin of Saint Jerome’s Vulgate) as if the reference is to the Word of God, meaning the teachings or message of God. But the Greek in the source documents is logos. In Greek philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus of Ephesus who flourished around 500 BCE, the logos is logic or reason, the universal principle by which nature is governed and all things are interrelated. In the original Greek text of the Gospel of John, Jesus is the logic of the universe – a far more powerful conception than merely the word, or spokesperson, of God. Sadly, we can probably blame the influence of the Latin Vulgate for this linguistic vandalism. Latin has a rather small vocabulary compared with modern English. The Latin noun verbum can mean word, but it can also mean idea, concept, point of view, thesis… Translating the Greek logos as the Latin verbum was probably excusable – Saint Jerome agonized over the translation – but taking it back into English as word was a scholarly sin of the highest order.

Galeano emphasized the import of nature in the European “conquest/invasion” of Latin America and the subsequent and ongoing colonial project. And he “located” the divorce of nature and people’s communion within—and as fundamental to—the venture of Western civilization.1 The growing recognition, particularly in the “Souths” of the world today, that Western civilization is in crisis, and the propositions coming from Abya-Yala (the name, originally from the Cuna language, that indigenous peoples collectively give to the Americas today) for radically distinct life-models and visions interlaced with and in nature, give Galeano’s words pragmatic substance. Galeano’s words also, in a sense, establish the importance of location and place; that is to say, of the place and location from which we think the world, and act, struggle, and live in and with it.

This book attempts to convey something of the characteristic viewpoint on the world of each language whose story it tells. Evidently, living in a particular language does not define a total philosophy of life: but some metaphors will come to mind more readily than others; and some states of mind, or attitudes to others, are easier to assume in one language than another. It cannot be a matter of indifference which language we speak, or which languages our ancestors spoke. Languages frame, analyse and colour our views of the world. 'I have three hearts,' claimed Ennius, an early master poet in Latin, on the strength of his fluency in Latin, Greek, and Oscan.

The telegram "GRANDMOTHER DEAD FUNERAL WEDNESDAY" can be translated into any language you like—from Latin and Hindustani to the dialects of the Apaches, Eskimos, or the tribe of Dobu. We could even do this, no doubt, with the language of the Mousterian period, if we knew it. The reason is that everyone h as a mother, who has a mother; that everyone must die; that the ritualization of the disposing of a corpse is a cultural constant; as is, also, the principle of reckoning time. But beings that are unisexual would not know the distinction between mother and father, and those that divide like amoebas would be unable to form the idea even of a unisexual parent. The meanings of "grandmother" thus could not be conveyed. Beings that do not die (amoebas, dividing, do not die) would be unacquainted with the notion of death and of funerals. They would therefore have to learn about human anatomy, physiology, evolution, history, and customs before they could begin the translation of this telegram that is so clear to us.

England may have never come to exist were it not for this one man, and it is with good reason that Alfred is the only English king to be known as “the Great.”2 He fought off the Danes; he unified England (well, sort of); he helped found a common law for everyone; he built towns for the first time since the Romans left; he introduced a navy; and most of all, he encouraged education and the arts in a country just emerging from centuries of illiteracy. Having learned to read in adulthood, King Alfred personally translated Latin texts into English and was the only king to write anything before Henry VIII, and the only European ruler between the second and thirteenth centuries to write on the philosophy of kingship.

The subject of 'perennial philosophy' is currently one of the many misleading themes employed in vulgar mysticism. Emanating from enthusiasts of traditional religion, this topic has been appropriated by new age communities and figureheads, to the extent that even Huxley can appear profound by comparison. The Latin phrase is often associated with Leibniz, who may be credited with a more genuine attitude, though it is clear that he did not resolve the issue involved. The term philosophy is currently so confused in application that it can mean anything saleable or novelistic.

In Latin the word ‘museum’ once indicated ‘a temple of the Muses’; in what respects is the modern museum the right place to preserve treasures from a classical temple? Does it only look the part? The issues raised by Bassae provide a model for understanding Classics in its widest sense. Of course, Classics is about more than the physical remains, the architecture, sculpture, pottery, and painting, of ancient Greece and Rome. It is also (to select just a few things) about the poetry, drama, philosophy, science, and history written in the ancient world, and still read and debated as part of our culture. But here too, essentially similar issues are at stake, questions about how we are to read literature which has a history of more than 2,000 years, written in a society very distant and different from our own.

Martí still had to consider himself lucky, since in 1871 eight medical students had been executed for the alleged desecration of a gravesite in Havana. Those executed were selected from the student body by lottery, and they may not have even been involved in the desecration. In fact, some of them were not even in Havana at the time, but it quickly became obvious to everyone that the Spanish government was not fooling around! Some years later Martí studied law at the Central University of Madrid (University of Zaragoza). As a student he started sending letters directly to the Spanish Prime Minister insisting on Cuban autonomy, and he continued to write what the Spanish government considered inflammatory newspaper editorials. In 1874, he graduated with a degree in philosophy and law. The following year Martí traveled to Madrid, Paris and Mexico City where he met the daughter of a Cuban exile, Carmen Zayas-Bazán, whom he later married. In 1877 Martí paid a short visit to Cuba, but being constantly on the move he went on to Guatemala where he found work teaching philosophy and literature. In 1878 he published his first book, Guatemala, describing the beauty of that country. The daughter of the President of Guatemala had a crush on Martí, which did not go unnoticed by him. María was known as “La Niña de Guatemala,” the child of Guatemala. She waited for Martí when he left for Cuba, but when he returned he was married to Carmen Zayas-Bazán. María died shortly thereafter on May 10, 1878, of a respiratory disease, although many say that she died of a broken heart. On November 22, 1878, Martí and Carmen had a son whom they named José Francisco. Doing the math, it becomes obvious as to what had happened…. It was after her death that he wrote the poem “La Niña de Guatemala.” The Cuban struggle for independence started with the Ten Years’ War in 1868 lasting until 1878. At that time, the Peace of Zanjón was signed, giving Cuba little more than empty promises that Spain completely ignored. An uneasy peace followed, with several minor skirmishes, until the Cuban War of Independence flared up in 1895. In December of 1878, thinking that conditions had changed and that things would return to normal, Martí returned to Cuba. However, still being cautious he returned using a pseudonym, which may have been a mistake since now his name did not match those in the official records. Using a pseudonym made it impossible for him to find employment as an attorney. Once again, after his revolutionary activities were discovered, Martí was deported to Spain. Arriving in Spain and feeling persecuted, he fled to France and continued on to New York City. Then, using New York as a hub, he traveled and wrote, gaining a reputation as an editorialist on Latin American issues. Returning to the United States from his travels, he visited with his family in New York City for the last time. Putting his work for the revolution first, he sent his family back to Havana. Then from New York he traveled to Florida, where he gave inspiring speeches to Cuban tobacco workers and cigar makers in Ybor City, Tampa. He also went to Key West to inspire Cuban nationals in exile. In 1884, while Martí was in the United States, slavery was finally abolished in Cuba. In 1891 Martí approved the formation of the Cuban Revolutionary Party.

People who add Latin phrases to their sentences to sound intellectual are like those who use words from Eastern religions and philosophies or traditional cultures to appear enlightened: They cannot be taken too seriously. That’s the de facto modus operandi of my kismet — قِسْمَة وَنَصِيبٍ — which didn’t emerge ex nihilo. Carpe Omnia, everyone. Hoʻoponopono. Namaste. Et cetera.

Parmenides said: “To think and to be are one and the same.” Philosophers had similar thoughts about this question from Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Augustine to Avicenna. “Je pense, donc je suis“ (“I think, therefore I am, “or “I am thinking, therefore I exist.“) Descartes used first in French in his Discourse on the Method (1637) and later in Latin in Principles of Philosophy and Meditations on First Philosophy. One of the easiest ways to reconcile Descartes’ cogito ergo sum argument with counterarguments against it would be to modify it slightly: I am the thought. This thought exists. Therefore, I exist. Everything that exists, regardless of whether it is aware of its existence, is information itself, a message, or a thought of the Universal Eternal Source of everything. The I that thinks, whatever it may be, exists. An I is not the source of thinking, but thinking is the source of an I. An I is the consequence of thinking. An I does not presuppose existence but is only a confirmation of existence. Existence is not the consequence of an I. I do not exist because I am an I. Thinking I is a confirmation of existence per se, independent of whether I am that I or not. The sole possibility that I may think I am thinking is enough to prove the existence of a being that thinks or thinks that it (he-she) thinks. Otherwise, this being would not be able to be wrong or right, delusional, or deceived. Identification of an I, and with an I, or with the self, is not the source of existence: I do not exist because I think, but my thinking, even if not mine, proves the existence of whatever or whoever is thinking.

We can be sure that the fifth element (idea) was immaterial for Plato and Aristotle, who used the term aether. The fifth element (Latin: quinta esentia) differs from the other four elements (Earth, Water, Fire, and Air). When we look at aether, from the perspective of our philosophy, as the main principle before the formation of the world, as a potential (in posse), during its actualization (in esse), and as the underlying Being or reality of all the existence, then this term can be equated with God or, conditionally, with the Universal Mind. A posse ad esse is the transformation from the potential of the Universal Mind to its actualization as the Universe.

Latin was the language of science, technology, medicine and law, apart from, of course, classical literature. It was also the language in Europe of international communication, scholarship and diplomacy. Since some of those countries which speak languages derived from Latin and value it as an ancient and classical language and the repository of much wisdom, were also ruthless colonisers, does that make Latin only a language of exploitation? Are the Vatican and the Pope only ‘colonisers’, since Latin is still the official language of the Holy See? It is a moot point whether Sheldon Pollock would agree to see Latin only from such a narrow perspective. Why then does he not have the same approach to Sanskrit? Rajiv Malhotra makes a spirited critique of these kinds of double standards, and confuses it with a new Orientalism in some sections of American Indology. He accepts that Sanskrit was more a preserve of the elite and that some sections of its corpus do contain prescriptions for social and gender exclusion. But, it is essential that, as with other classical languages, a narrow dismissal is tempered with the right balance and judicious appraisal. Sanskrit, Rajiv Malhotra strongly argues, was also the ‘repository of philosophy, art, architecture, popular song, classical music, dance, theatre, sculpture, painting, literature, pilgrimage, ritual and religious narratives. It also incorporates all branches of natural science and technology—medicine, botany, mathematics, engineering, dietetics etc.’25 More than anything else, it was the vehicle of the great spiritual, philosophical and creative wisdoms distilled over millennia. Malhotra adds that it was not just a communication tool, but also a vehicle for ‘enduring sacredness, aesthetic powers, metaphysical acuity, and ability to generate knowledge in many domains’.

Bezaliel is associated (like Azazel) with the Fulgura Inferna, the lightning flash which sprang from the ground. The Fulgura Inferna was possessed by Chthonic Deities in the ancient Etruscan religion. The Etruscan word for ‘lightning’ was rendered by the Latin ‘bidens’, ‘Forked Lightning’ is represented as the Two-Pronged Fork. This symbol is associated with the fork of Hades, God of the Underworld. The associations and deep meaning in Luciferian symbolism has layers of hidden knowledge which can be applied to initiatory benefit not only in philosophy but spiritual development as well. If you choose the path of Cacodaimonic Nephilim Apotheosis, Bezaliel is a key to insight and guidance upon this theoretical and forbidden possibility.

Ghalib and Gerard translated no fewer than eighty-eight works of astronomy, mathematics, medicine, philosophy and logic, the very branches of learning which underpinned the great revival of scholarship in Europe referred to as the Twelfth-Century Renaissance.16 They focused especially on translating the greatest works of the Greek scientists of antiquity, particularly Ptolemy and Aristotle, but they also worked to bring original Indian and Arab works into Latin. Among these was Khwarizmi’s Book of Addition and Subtraction According to the Hindu Calculation, and the book which went on to define algebra for Europeans, the Kitab al-Jabr.17

Amor Fati is Latin for “a love of Fate”.

He was a boy who saw spirits in the beech and laurel woods; but he also could sit patiently at the feet of Father Teofilo of Nola, who taught him Latin and the laws of logic, and told him that the world was round. In his Dialogues Bruno sometimes gives the spokesman for his own philosophy that priest’s name: Teofilo. He writes in the De monade, his last long Latin poem: Far back in my boyhood the struggle began.

Educating the Educators (Sonnet 2281) Greeks did not invent philosophy, philosophy had existed across Latin America, Africa, Arabia, India and China, thousands of years earlier, not as some elitist discipline, but as everyday way of life, later the europeans contributed their puny drop in the ocean, but of course, the myth of europe as the origin of philosophy goes deceptively well with the whitewashed history of earth. Maps of the world are whitewashed, history of the world is whitewashed, ethics of the world are whitewashed, knowledge of the world is whitewashed. No wisdom is flawless 'n absolute, ancient or modern, but the point is, enlightenment and civilization did not originate in europe, they were born of the lands colonially categorized as uncivilized.

Greeks did not invent philosophy, philosophy had existed across Latin America, Africa, Arabia, India and China, thousands of years earlier, not as some elitist discipline, but as everyday way of life, later the europeans contributed their puny drop in the ocean, but of course, the myth of europe as the origin of philosophy goes deceptively well with the whitewashed history of earth.

Greeks did not invent philosophy, philosophy had existed across Latin America, Africa, Arabia, India and China, thousands of years earlier, not as some elitist discipline, but as everyday way of life, later the europeans contributed their puny drop in the ocean, but of course, the myth of europe as the origin of philosophy goes deceptively well with the whitewashed history of earth. Enlightenment and civilization did not originate in europe, they were born of the lands colonially categorized as uncivilized.

Spirit is a very peculiar concept which has in many cases lost its original character, but the history of the word spirit, or the German word Geist, tells us what it originally meant. The Greek word pneuma and the Latin word spiritus mean wind, and the Latin word animus is the same as the Greek word anemos, and they also mean wind. Pneuma is still the term in the Greek Orthodox church for the Holy Ghost, which is the sacred wind; it is a movement, a force. And Geist comes from a root which means to well up; it is a sort of enthusiasm, an emotional condition. The English word aghast is an emotional word which comes from it, and the word ghost is related to it. Geist was understood to be like a geyser, a welling up, an inspiration. In the miracle of Pentecost, all those symbolic phenomena are together; the fiery tongues mean the fire of enthusiasm: the apostles were like drunken people, and a powerful wind filled the house. That was spirit, but to us spirit has become something exceedingly lame and ineffectual, a mere two-dimensional picture — sort of beliefs or ideas that have no body and no force; one must believe them to give them any force. In the philosophy of Klages, one learns that the spirit is now the devil that destroys life, but he at least attributes a destructive power to it. And Scheler, who tried to restore a certain amount of importance to the spirit, made again a very lame thing of it; it is neither very destructive nor very effective. That powerful wind, which was destructive as well as generative or emotional, has gone. It is a poor thing with us now, no longer what it used to be. This process has come about within two thousand years. It was God in the beginning, and before that time it was latent in what man calls "God," that incomprehensible power in the depth of his own soul. And man supposes that this is in the depth of the universe in general because the microcosm is in no way different from the macrocosm; so what is in the depth of the soul was in the universe before, in that eternal source of life. Then it became visible or audible; it became the evangelion, the glad tidings, and people received it. But later it grew into an organization, so the effect was lost in created things. You see, the creative impulse comes to an end with the creation, just because it has become a creation; for a while there is no longer an impulse — until one has liberated oneself again from that which one has created. If one sticks to the creation, one will create nothing more. And so the time comes when the world is absolutely empty of spirit, when nobody knows what spirit is, when there are only the effects of the spirit — though those effects make visible efforts to remember the times when they were young, as old people like to speak about their youth just because they have it no longer. This descent which has happened to us within the last two thousand years, then, is the phenomenon to which Nietzsche here refers — of course in a more or less negative way. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 494-495). Princeton University Press.

Pluralism is Civilizational Emergency (Sonnet 2609-2610) Mainstream earth history, which is systematically bloated with euro philosophy, euro theology, euro morality, is corrupted to the bone, all propagated as carrier of truth, while in fact, europe is the cradle of lies and cruelty - the human race comes from Africa, but inhumanity originated in Europe. Indigenous people wear animal skin as clothes, it's called uncivilized, privileged people wear the same skin, expensively processed in chemicals, and it's called fashion. Arabic is one of the rarest soulful languages spoken by the human race, yet in the hands of eurocentric propaganda apes are conditioned like pavlov's dogs into believing it to be the most sinister. Europe did give us pragmatism, which has its place but only as a toddler among the constellations of civilizations - empathy originated in Mother Africa, naturalism originated in Latin America, divine love originated in Arabia, equilibrium originated in China, integration originated in India. Pluralism is not a polite idealism, pluralism is civilizational emergency. Divided we are space-racing monkeys, integrated we are Upright Humanity.