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Origins of Thought
This List Is By:
Thomas Lannon
Manuscripts & Archives Division. New York Public Library
Helpful texts in ascertaining being
JUSTICE or right thinking: Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, Chapter: 10: Of equity
Liberty Fund translation:
“What is equitable, then, is just, and better than what is just in one sense of the word—not better than what is absolutely just, but better than that which fails through its lack of qualification. And the essence of what is equitable is that it is an amendment of the law, in those points where it fails through the generality of its language.”
Another translation (Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy & its Humanist Reception, New Haven: Yale, 1997):
Hence, while the equitable is just, and is superior to one sort of justice (ou tou haplos,) but only to the error (hamartema) due to its absolute statement. This is the essential nature of the equitable: it is a rectification (epanorthoma) of law where law is defective because of generality. In fact this is the reason why things are not all determined by law: it is because there are some cases for which it is impossible to lay down a law, so that a special ordinance becomes necessary. For what is itself indefinite can only be measured by an indefinite standard, like the leaded rule used by Lesbian builders; just as that rule is not rigid but can be bent to the shape of the stone, so a special ordinance is made to fit the circumstance of the case.
Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle, trans. F.H. Peters, M.A. 5th edition (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Truebner & Co., 1893). Chapter: 10.: Of equity
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/903/70726 on 2008-04-11
ROMANTICISM or prostration before the All: Plotinus, Ennead 1, On Dialectic
The born lover, to whose degree the musician also may attain—and then either come to a stand or pass beyond—has a certain memory of beauty but, severed from it now, he no longer comprehends it: spell-bound by visible loveliness he clings amazed about that. His lesson must be to fall down no longer in bewildered delight before some, one embodied form; he must be led, under a system of mental discipline, to beauty everywhere and made to discern the One Principle underlying all, a Principle apart from the material forms, springing from another source, and elsewhere more truly present.
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Plotinus, The Ethical Treatises, being the Treatises of the First Ennead, with Porphry’s Life of Plotinus, and the Preller-Ritter Extracts forming a Conspectus of the Plotinian System, translated from Greek by Stephen Mackenna (Boston: Charles T. Branford, 1918). Chapter: THIRD TRACTATE On Dialectic (The Upward Way)
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/1272/6645 on 2008-04-11