Porphyry Quotes on Knowledge
Porphyry of Tyre (c. 234 – c. 305), Plotinus's pupil and the editor of the six Enneads in which his master's philosophical writings were preserved, gave the late-antique philosophical curriculum its most influential introductory text in the Isagoge — a brief treatise on the five predicables (genus, species, differentia, property, accident) that would, through Boethius's Latin translation, frame the medieval scholastic problem of universals for the next millennium. The framework supplies the canonical preliminary to Aristotle's Categories, and Porphyry's broader Neoplatonist commentaries — together with the Letter to Marcella and the polemical Against the Christians — extended Plotinus's metaphysics into the form in which the subsequent Athenian and Alexandrian Neoplatonist schools would receive it.
Quotes
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Attributed to Porphyry:
“Empty are the words of that philosopher which heal no human suffering.”
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Attributed to Porphyry:
“Let us look at things as they are, not as they appear.”
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“Introduction to Aristotle's Organon , as translated by Octavius Freire Owen (1853), p. v”
The utility of a science which enables men to take cognizance of the travellers on the mind 's highway, and excludes those disorderly interlopers, verbal fallacies , needs but small attestation. Its searching penetration by definition alone, before which even mathematical precision fails, would especially commend it to those whom the abstruseness of the study does not terrify, and who recognise th -
“Every body is in place ; but nothing essentially incorporeal, or any thing of this kind, has any locality.”
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“The fleshless diet contributes to health and to a suitable endurance of hard work in philosophy.”
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“Not only can logos be seen in absolutely all animals, but in many of them it has the groundwork for being perfected.”
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“The Pythagoreans made kindness to beasts a training in humanity and pity.”
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