Translation, bibliography, commentary, and an updating essay including a translation from the Coptic text of, and a commentary on, the new Nag Hammadi Hermetica.

This article deals with an object of Philosophy, strictly the Philosophy of Language, which concerns the study of the logic and of the dialectics. So, it proposes to analyze the dialectic-logical conceptual aspects in the Corpus Hermeticum 12.12-14a in comparison with the logical texts of the Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, in order to find supposed sources conformed with the hermetic text, and know how they were re-worked in it. For that, the references, descriptions and quotations of Sextus Empiricus and (...) of Diocles Magnes, apud Diogenes Laertius, they constitute important sources on the philosophical doctrines of Zenon, Cleanthes and Crysippus. One considers that the doctrine of the first part of the Corp. Herm. 12 is, often, Platonic. Nevertheless, there are realized signs of influences of stoicism. The conception about νοῦς [nous] in the man is from Platonic origin, but the expression προφοριϰὸς λόγος [prophorikos logos] is certainly Stoic. Then, the Corp. Herm. 12 is a product of a middle-stoicism or middle-Platonism, stoicizing Platonism or platonizing Stoicism, which cannot have appeared before the c. I B.C.E. Specifically, the article is interested in the dialectic-logical problem that involve some Stoic concepts, as λόγος, προφοριϰὸς λόγος, φωνή [phōnē], as well as the problem of the connective propositional logic in the platonizing process through the doctrine of νοῦς themed in the Corp. Herm. 12.12-14a, assuming a theological dimension and a divine character of λόγος, by being ἐνδιάϑετος λόγος, the thought that exists ἐν τῇ διαϑέσει, ἐν τῷ νῷ. (shrink)

Dieser Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit der These von Frances Yates, dass Denker wie Giordano Bruno und Agrippa von Nettesheim angenommen haben, dass die Schriften des Hermes Trismegistos von dem Ägypter Thoth (Hermes) stammten. Es soll in diesem Aufsatz demonstriert werden, dass die Annahme von Yates sehr spekulativ war und zumindest nicht auf Agrippa zutrifft, da aus keiner seiner Schriften hervorgeht, dass er das Corpus Hermeticum für Texte des Ägypters Hermes selbst hielt. Er glaubte zwar an die Legende des (...) Hermes, aber in dieser Abhandlung wird die Hypothese überprüft, dass Agrippa dem Neuplatoniker Jamblichus folgte, dass griechische Philosophen, die ungefähr in der Zeit von Jamblichus lebten, diese Schriften verfasst haben. Damit wäre die Hypothese von Frances Yates widerlegt, nach der Agrippa glaubte, das Corpus Hermeticum würde direkt vom Ägypter Thoth herrühren. Aus der „Occulta philosophia“ geht hervor, dass Agrippa die Werke Jamblichus hervorragend kannte, doch Yates hielt es scheinbar für nicht relevant, dass Jamblichus darauf hingewiesen hatte, dass das Corpus Hermeticum von ägyptischen Priestern geschrieben wurden. Es war damit nicht Casaubon, der als Erster erkannt hat, dass das Corpus Hermeticum unmöglich auf eine ägyptische Legende mit dem Namen Hermes zurückgehen konnte. Casaubon dachte selbst nicht, dass er der Erste war, der den Irrtum aufdeckte, denn er berichtete ebenfalls von der Aussage von Jamblichus. (shrink)

The Hermetica are a body of mystical texts written in late antiquity, but believed during the Renaissance (when they became well known) to be much older. Their supposed author, a mythical figure named Hermes Trismegistus, was thought to be a contemporary of Moses. The Hermetic philosophy was regarded as an ancient theology, parallel to the revealed wisdom of the Bible, supporting Biblical revelation and culminating in the Platonic philosophical tradition. This new translation is the only English version based on reliable (...) texts, and Professor Copenhaver's introduction and notes make this accessible and up-to-date edition an indispensable resource to scholars. (shrink)

O tópico do presente artigo é a teoria da _ε__ἱ__μαρμένη_ [_heimarmen__ē_]. Ele analisa focalmente a relação da teoria da _ε__ἱ__μαρμένη_ do _Corp. Herm._ 12.5-9 e de fontes médio-platônicas. Os resultados da análise se limitam a responder as teorias da _ε__ἱ__μαρμένη_ do hermetismo e do médio-platonismo. No entanto, existem diferentes pontos de vista sobre a teoria da _ε__ἱ__μαρμένη_ no médio-platonismo. Assim, o escopo envolve principalmente o _Corp. Herm._ 12.5-9, _De Fato_ de Plutarco de Queroneia, _De Doctrina Platonis_ de Alcínoo e _De (...) Platone_ de Apuleio de Madaura. O presente artigo demonstra, por meio do método filosófico histórico-comparativo, que a teoria da _ε__ἱ__μαρμένη_ do _Corp. Herm._ 12.5-9 é predominantemente médio-platônica apesar das incidências das proposições (neo)estoicas. Assim, em particular, este artigo assume que o _Corp. Herm._ 12.5-9 tem uma combinação da _heimarmenologia_ com a teoria platônica do _νο__ῦ__ς_ [nous]. Primeiramente, serão apontados os significados de _ε__ἱ__μαρμένη_ e seus correlatos no _Corp. Herm._ como um todo em comparação com o platonismo. Depois, discutir-se-á a escolha de ações prudentes e apaixonadas pela alma no _Corp. Herm._ 12.-5-9. Em seguida, procurar-se-á explicar quais são as implicações da _ε__ἱ__μαρμένη_ no _ἐ__λλόγιμοι_ (prudentes) no _Corp. Herm._ 12.-5-9. Por fim, será demonstrado que este texto é influenciado pela _teoria do destino condicional ou hipotético_ diferentemente de uma doutrina puramente estoica. (shrink)

Given the Corpus Hermeticum’s history of formation, it has prompted the attempt to separate layers or groups of writings within the collection of treatises. This process of division, which was for the most part undertaken on criteria of content (dualism, pantheism, etc.), has been viewed rather negatively by the more recent research, on grounds of method. Given the discovery of numerous doctrinal contents that remain constant across different treatises, increased efforts are being made to reconstruct the Corpus’s (...) moments of unity. The present paper aims, in this spirit, to provide a more precise identification of the overarching forms of theological thought in the Hermetic writings. The reflections that follow aim to make it plausible that the defining form of theological thought in the Corpus Hermeticum can be classified as panentheism. In addition, the distinctive form of this influential theological paradigm in the Hermetic writings will be considered. (shrink)

Marsilio Ficino’s fame as a translator, not least due to his contributions to theology and the development of hermeticism, has already been established by Frances Yates and debated by Wouter Hanegraaff. For each of his translations of Greek texts, Ficino wrote a preface to guide and to manipulate the reader. This paper presents an analysis of the auctoritas in the paratext of the Corpus Hermeticum, analyzing it as a rhetorical device used by Ficino to express his ideas, particularly (...) the role of Hermes Trismegistus. Ficino used his rhetorical skill not only to translate from Greek to Latin but also to support his theories in commentaries, letters, or, in this case, prefaces. (shrink)

O presente artigo trata de um objeto da História da Filosofia. Sendo assim, objetiva analisar as correlações literárias dos textos de Timaeus 71E - 72B, Symposium 202E – 203A e Phaedrus 244B-244E em relação ao Corpus Hermeticum 12.19, com a finalidade de encontrar supostas fontes enquadradas no texto hermético, e saber como elas foram retrabalhadas nele. Assim, busca perguntar pela origem, história, significado e aplicação de motivos que incidem nos textos cotejados, incluindo o Corpus Hermeticum 12.19, (...) perscrutando as correlações histórico-religiosas a fim de encontrar nexos traditivos comparáveis do mundo filosófico-religioso contemporâneo do Corpus Hermeticum 12.19. Em particular, este artigo demonstra que o Corpus Hermeticum 12.19 descreve a arte divinatória ou das artes mânticas através da inspiração, aruspício e augúrio. Pode-se vislumbrar o tema da comunicação entre Deus e o homem através das artes mânticas. Por último, o presente artigo, tomando como base o enfoque helenista, aventa que o Corpus Hermeticum XII.19 tem influência médio-platonista. (shrink)

Este presente artigo tem por objetivo fazer considerações acerca da origem tardia do Corpus Hermeticum, assim como seu possível desenvolvimento, a partir do caldo multicultural e das similaridades religiosas entre as escolas filosóficas da Grécia clássica e helenística, em específico por influência direta de Pitágoras e de Platão, por meio de Plutarco, da escola eclética e de certa influência indireta das escolas do oriente, em específico a egípcia, na tentativa de revelar a possível, mas bem provável, origem posterior (...) ao séc I dos escritos conhecidos como Corpus Hermeticum. Essa conjunção de escolas de pensamento, podem ter tido o efeito em comum e uma possível responsabilidade de formarem, ou até mesmo de servirem como agente acelerador, do pensamento filosófico grego pré-socrático, que irá influir diretamente no pensamento clássico e helenístico. (shrink)

One of the tasks faced by young children is the segmentation of a continuous stream of speech into discrete linguistic units. Early in development, syllables emerge as perceptual primitives, and the wholesale storage of syllable chunks is one possible strategy for bootstrapping the segmentation process. Here, we investigate what types of chunks children store. Our method involves selecting syllabified utterances from corpora of child-directed speech, which we vary according to (a) their length in syllables, (b) the mutual predictability of their (...) syllables, and (c) their frequency. We then use the number of utterances within which words are contained to predict the time course of word learning, arguing that utterances which perform well at this task are also more likely to be stored, by young children, as undersegmented chunks. Our results show that short utterances are best-suited for predicting when children acquire the words contained within them, although the effect is rather small. Beyond this, we also find that short utterances are the most likely to correspond to words. Together, the two findings suggest that children may not store many complete utterances as undersegmented chunks, with most of the units that children store as hypothesized words corresponding to \textit{actual} words. However, dovetailing with an item-based account of language-acquisition, when children do store undersegmented chunks, these are likely to be short sequences -- not frequent or internally predictable multi-word chunks. We end by discussing implications for work on formulaic multi-word sequences. (shrink)

With the rapidly expanding catalogue of scientific publications, especially within the Biomedical Sciences field, it is becoming increasingly difficult for researchers to search for, read or even interpret emerging scientific findings. PubMed, just one of the current biomedical data repositories, comprises over 33 million citations for biomedical research, and over 2500 publications are added each day. To further strengthen the impact biomedical research, we suggest that there should be more synergy between publications and machines. By bringing machines into the realm (...) of research and publication, we can greatly augment the assessment, investigation and cataloging of the biomedical literary corpus. The effective application of machine-based manuscript assessment and interpretation is now crucial, and potentially stands as the most effective way for researchers to comprehend and process the tsunami of biomedical data and literature. Many biomedical manuscripts are currently published online in poorly searchable document types, with figures and data presented in formats that are partially inaccessible to machine-based approaches. The structure and format of biomedical manuscripts should be adapted to facilitate machine-assisted interrogation of this important literary corpus. In this context, it is important to embrace the concept that biomedical scientists should also write manuscripts that can be read by machines. It is likely that an enhanced human–machine synergy in reading biomedical publications will greatly enhance biomedical data retrieval and reveal novel insights into complex datasets. (shrink)

Research made by Schuhmann and Bredekamp has pointed up the unsuspected links between Hobbes and one of the ancient traditions best loved by Renaissance philosophy: Hermeticism. Our goal will be to proceed further and to stress the Hermetic significance implicit in the formula "mortal God". If Asclepius can act as a source for the theme of the fabrication of gods, it does not fit in with the antithesis ("mortal god/immortal God") typical of the Leviathan. A proper source for this topic (...) can rather be found in treatise X ("Clavis") of the Corpus Hermeticum , well known to Ficino and to Iustus Lipsius. We must also stress one capital difference: whereas in the Hermetic texts man's apotheosis passes through gnosis and the exercise of the intellect, reserved in practice for a few selected people, in Leviathan on the contrary it is the holder of sovereignty who acquires the features of the "mortal god". Divinisation passes through politics, with the delicate artificial process of "generating the state"; knowledge only provides the tools for the rational technique needed to elaborate sovereignty, through stipulating pacts and the convention of impersonation. The "artificial man" as a mortal God is the apotheosis of the common man who enters into the founding pact with his ordinary intellectual and motivational faculties. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to indicate the dimensions of Walter Benjamin’s conception of "technique". It is argued that the only way to understand his problematic technique is by considering the concepts of experience and political action. The present article emphasizes the philosopher’s transitivity of technical understanding through a wide range of reflections including Benjamin’s thoughts on Scheerbarts to "second technique" (zweite Technik), from his idea of collective corpus (Leib) to his understanding of experience (Erfahrung), and from (...) the canonic feature of architecture in modern time to revolutionary action. We focused on the common issues in the texts of Benjamin entitled "Experience and Poverty", "Capitalism as Religion" and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility". At the same time, we stress why the technical question and technicality are central issues in order to understand other Benjamin texts. We use the thematic continuity and differentiation thesis as a method instead of disengagement in his writings. Our essential thesis in this article is that according to Benjamin, a true political organization is an action which puts an end to the domination of the first technique over the second technique. In other words, Benjamin's conception of technique implies on the one hand a radical criticism of the existing order and on the other hand a political moment where all the phantasmagorias of the masses dissolve. In this context, the phantasmagorias, made visible through urban space, are at the same time possibilities for a revolutionary action in order to actualize the hidden forces of humanity. (shrink)

This book places Benjamin’s writing on revolution in the context of his conception of historical knowledge. The fundamental problem that faces any analysis of Benjamin’s approach to revolution is that he deploys notions that belong to the domain of individual experience. His theory of modernity with its emphasis on the disintegration of collective experience further aggravates the problem. Benjamin himself understood the problem of revolution to be primarily that of the conceptualization of collective experience (its possibility and sites) under the (...) conditions of modern bourgeois society. The novelty of his approach to revolution lies in the fact that he directly connects it with historical experience. Benjamin’s conception of revolution thus constitutes an integral part of his distinctive theory of historical knowledge, which is also essentially a theory of experience. Through a detailed study of Benjamin’s writings on the topics of the child and the dream, and an analysis of his ideas of history, the fulfilled wish, similitude and communist society, this book shows how the conceptual analysis of his corpus can get to the heart of Benjamin’s conception of revolutionary experience and distil its difficulties and mechanisms. (shrink)

In this incisive new work, Eli Friedlander demonstrates that Walter Benjamin's entire corpus, from early to late, comprises a rigorous and sustained philosophical questioning of how human beings belong to nature. Across seemingly heterogeneous writings, Friedlander argues, Benjamin consistently explores what the natural in the human comes to, that is, how nature is transformed, actualized, redeemed, and overcome in human existence. The book progresses gradually from Benjamin's philosophically fundamental writings on language and nature to his Goethean empiricism, from (...) the presentation of ideas to the primal history of the Paris arcades. Friedlander's careful analysis brings out how the idea of natural history inflects Benjamin's conception of the work of art and its critique, his diagnosis of the mythical violence of the legal order, his account of the body and of action, of material culture and technology, as well as his unique vision of historical materialism. Featuring revelatory new readings of Benjamin's major works that differ, sometimes dramatically, from prevailing interpretations, this book reveals the internal coherence and philosophical force of Benjamin's thought. (shrink)

This book provides a highly original approach to the writings of the twentieth-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin by one of his most distinguished readers. It develops the idea of "working with" Benjamin, seeking both to read his corpus and to put it to work - to show how a reading ofBenjamin can open up issues that may not themselves be immediately at stake in his texts.The defining elements in Benjamin's writings that Andrew Benjamin isolates - history, experience, translation, (...) technical reproducibility and politics - are put to work; that is, their utility is established in engaging the works of others. The question is how utility is understood. As AndrewBenjamin argues, utility involves demonstrating the different ways in which Benjamin is a central thinker within the project of understanding the nature of modernity. This is best achieved by noting connections and points of differentiation between his work and the writings of Adorno and Heidegger.However, the more demanding project is that "working with" Benjamin necessitates deploying the implicit assumptions within his writings as well as demanding of his formulations more than is provided by their initial presentation. What is at stake is not the application of Benjamin's thought. Ratherwhat counts is its use.Working with Benjamin engages with the themes central to Benjamin's work with deftness, daring and critical insight while at the same time situating those themes within current academic and cultural debates. (shrink)

Resumen: Si bien el interés del filósofo Walter Benjamin por el espacio urbano viene motivando desde hace tiempo estudios y análisis exhaustivos, no sucede otro tanto con sus numerosas reflexiones sobre el espacio natural. Tratando de suplir esta carencia, el artículo toma como núcleo un corpus de escritos del autor que dan cuenta de ese interés -fragmentos ensayísticos, relatos breves, diarios, correspondencia- con el fin de evaluar las variables filosóficas que se manifiestan en el contacto del pensador alemán (...) con el paisaje y la manera en la que los escenarios naturales acogen y determinan su talante y su trayectoria personal.: Although the interest of the philosopher Walter Benjamin for the urban space has been motivating exhaustive studies and analysis for a long time, the same cannot be said of his many reflections on the natural space. Trying to fill this gap, the article takes as its core a corpus of writings by the author that account for this interest -essay fragments, short stories, diaries, correspondence- in order to evaluate the philosophical variables that become evident in the contact of the German thinker with the landscape and the way the natural settings receive and determine his mood and his personal trajectory. (shrink)