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Not only the Greeks in general — Aristotle no less than Plato — but the great medieval thinkers as well, all held that there was an element of purely receptive "looking," not only in self-perception but also in intellectual knowing or, as Heraclitus said, "Listening-in to the being of things."
The medievals distinguished between the intellect as ratio and the intellect as intellectus. Ratio is the power of discursive thought, of searching and re-searching, abstracting, refining, and concluding , whereas intellectus refers to the ability of "simply looking" , to which the truth presents itself as a landscape presents itself to the eye. (en) |