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When you get to neo-Platonic emanation being
postmodernity, and end up tossing Yeats into the
mix, I fear we're entering that night in which
all cows are black, if you'll forgive my Hegel. I
see the One looming, but I miss my Many!
>>
Trevor, are you being deliberately naughty in conflating that rather crude
Irish proverb, "At night, all cats are grey," with a valid Aristotelian
syllogism about black swans?
Shame on you!!!!
And wherefore Hegel?
On another track of this thread, and just not to have to write a separate
post, I could never be doing with Bruno.
But then I don't have that much time (takes one to know one) with wordy
self-destructive pretentious losers. And I could never see what was new in
Bruno's work other than a stunning ability to say in 500 words what Cusanus
said in five.
"God is a sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere"
simply gave it the best wording in +Ignoranita+.
Erminia's right here, you *can* trace something like the concept, if not the
wording, back from Cusanus via the pseudo-Hermetic texts to Plotinus, though
not behind Plotinus to Plato.
Somewhere, google informs me, something like this appears in Augustine,
which of course by associational activity gives us Petrarch chatting to
Augustine in +On My Own Ignorance+ which does rather suggest the Cusanus
title. Did Petrarch know Cusanus' work? I *ought* to know this ...
(Now how's about *that* for academic displacement activity, Patrick my old
zimmer-frame abusing cabbage?
<g> )
Robin
(Glumly lighting a candle rather than curse the darkness in the midst of the
dark night of the soul.)
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