Sentence examples for intellect of god from inspiring English sources

The principle of intelligible order in the universe, Delmedigo believes, following Ibn Rushd, must be identified with the intellect of God.

He holds that sensations are literally modifications in the mind, but that they are highly indeterminate, or in later terminology lack determinate intentional objects, and that genuine understanding occurs only when and to the extent that the determinate ideas in the perfect intellect of God are disclosed to finite, human minds, to the extent that they are.

Malebranche's position can be considered a theological form of Platonism: Plato held that the true Ideas or Forms of things have a kind of perfection that neither ordinary objects nor representations of them in human minds do, and therefore must exist someplace else; Malebranche takes the obvious further step of supposing that perfect ideas can exist only in the perfect intellect of God.

The main distortion, as Delmedigo points out in this passage, is the rejection of the attribution of intellect to God.

Spinoza makes this remark in the context of explaining how the intellect and will of God must differ in kind from ours.

As the Psalmist writes, the one who will be permitted to ascend the hill of the Lord is the one whose hands are clean, whose fingers do not reach for idols -- idols either of the heart or mind, of passion or intellect, of philosophy or (God help us!) theology.

Plato's view of the soul also marks him as a spiritualist, and Aristotle was a spiritualist for distinguishing the active from the passive intellect and for conceiving of God as pure actuality (knowledge knowing itself).

These are the most positive intimations in Origen's extant works of a doctrine freely ascribed to him by his ancient critics, according to which all rational beings were once pure intellects in the presence of God, and would have remained so for ever had they not fallen away through koros or satiety.

We can find this idea of "thoughtlessness" in a sense in even Avicenna's more Aristotelian description of God as an Intellect: even qua Intellect, Avicenna's God creates "in virtue of His very essence," and not by a process of reasoning as we might understand it in human contexts.

Spinoza will add that such a thinker is not restricting God's omnipotence if God is the cause of all being and if alleged unactualized possibilities are outside the scope of God's intellect and will.

It is important, though, to keep in mind some important Islamic philosophical points of difference in considering Maimonides' context: Starting with al-Farabi and Avicenna, both envision Active Intellect as a key reality outside of God and outside of the human mind which plays a key role in the human process of knowledge-formation.