Talk:Nous

message: The article states that James used Nous to signify mental activities in general. 
While that is handy to know, it would be even more informative if it linked to the particular person referred to rather than the rather large list of people named James. I could hazard a guess but it would be no more than a guess. --Spondoolicks 11:04, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah, it seems to have been vandalism. I looked back in the history and until 203.214.43.48 had a go at it the sentence was Homer used Nous to signify mental activities in general.. --Spondoolicks 11:08, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Disambiguation needed

message: I agree with merging Divine Nous here. The other article would need a significant amount of content to justify its separate existence. And some of the references there seem dubious. Dan 06:01, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, dubious material is very much at home in the current form of the article, so go ahead and merge. --Akhilleus (talk) 17:03, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It's probably better to delete Divine Nous, as there is nothing good there.  The first three footnotes at Divine Nous refer to modern-neo-Pagan-occult nonsense.  Wareh 15:20, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: merge

message: The article currently states that Nous, "outside of philosophical contexts", is used in the meaning "common sense". This is certainly incorrect for the Greek language. The text should make clear that the meaning "common sense" appears only in the English language. It should also be made clear that this is not the only meaning of the term, "outside of philosophical contexts", e.g. shrewdness, a synonym for mind, etc. (And, by the way, the plural in "contexts" looks a bit clumsy to these eyes...) -The Gnome 07:42, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Please do supplement the information if you can.  I'm not sure I completely understand the Greek/English point.  The main philosophical usage, though a Greek-derived bit of jargon, is discussed as English not Greek; if philosophical texts in English did not speak of Nous, we'd have no article.  Are the items in your "not the only meaning" list all examples of the British  word rhyming with "louse"?  The point of the parenthesis is to keep those together and separate (since in American English, the term is only used as philosophical [etc.] jargon with its Greek pronunciation).  ("Contexts" feels best to me, but then again I may have written it back when we were cleaning up a far messier and confused presentation.) Wareh 14:47, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, I did. I believe the definition is simple and succinct now. -The Gnome 09:10, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: If the colloquial use of nous rhyming with "louse" is confined to British English, shouldn't you make this clear? --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 20:50, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

text: "Common sense" seems to me a terrible way to cash out nous. In English common sense strikes the ear with heavy connotations of "what most people believe" or "what is most obvious". I mean, I get that there is a synonymous sense of "common sense" but one rarely distinguishes that sense from all the others, which should be obvious if you go look at the wiki on [common sense]. Far better terms would be "getting it", "understanding", "discernment", "intuition" or "mother wit". 'Intuition' ought to be avoided, since it has other philosophical uses, and maybe "mother wit" because the dictionary will refer you straight to "common sense" when you look it up, but they're all better than "common sense".76.18.164.176 (talk) 05:43, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Definition

message: A discussion has started elsewhere which editors of this article are invited to comment about. But please respond here.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:58, 7 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  redirects, disambiguations, etc: intellect 

message: I've obviously started trying to find time to work on this article recently, and hopefully most of my efforts are basically uncontroversial copy-edits, structural work, and adding of sourced material. (Some material has been deleted here and there but normally only because I was replacing it with something similar I could source better.) Please of course feel free to raise concerns, but also of course be easy on me because this is slow going and the subject is easy to write up in a distorted and misleading way. My reason for making a note right now on this talk page is to mention a structural principle I am seeing take shape:-
*One based on how the article was, I've kept a basic chronological structure.
*However, within nearly every section, the same sections come up: the nous in soul of an individual, the nous as cosmic order, and any doctrines about links between these two. Maybe I should add doctrines relating to immortality of the soul.
*The recognition that the same categories keep coming up raises a question of whether these categories might one day provide a better structure to the article, instead of a chronological one.
*For now, I continue with chronological.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:13, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  update on recent editing efforts 

message: Along with the Neoplatonism section, one should also cite the Corpus Hermeticum, which makes extensive use of the term. Some translators have muddled the Hermetica pretty badly by translating Nous as "mind." I don't have the background to dive into this particular "mess," (perhaps that will become a Wikipedian term of art) so I won't try to fix it myself. Freeman (talk) 17:27, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Corpus hermeticum

message: Xenophon, the less famous of the two students of Socrates whose written accounts of him have survived, recorded that he taught his students a kind of teleological justification of piety and respect for divine order in nature. This has been described as an "intelligent design" argument for the existence of God, in which nature has its own nous.For example: , pp. 273-275; and . It has been claimed that his report might be the earliest report of such an argument in 
:Described by whom? Why are we even talking about the first theological argument for 'intelligent design'? MrSativa (talk) 05:08, 13 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: This is neither creationism nor intelligent design. Talk of 'intelligent design' has no place on a page dedicated to the concept of Nous.MrSativa (talk) 05:08, 13 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: The answer to your first question is in the source quoted. More generally, on Wikipedia we base ourselves upon what published sources say, and as explained in the article, the concept of Nous (intelligence) is/was associated with the concept of a cosmic intelligence that ordered and/or constantly orders nature, or in other words creates nature or at least nature's order. Hence this passing reference to intelligent design creationism.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:03, 13 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Xenophon

message: PantophileDiderot (talk) 14:27, 20 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Noology 

message: Is that clearly interpolated section in the best place? It's disruptive. 99.228.43.228 (talk) 19:54, 16 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm removing it, this article basically functions as an article on Ancient Greek philosophy of mind, so a comparison to another tradition should at the very least be cited, if it merits inclusion in the article at all. And pre-Socratic philosophy is also evidently not the place for it.  - car chasm (talk) 02:24, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comparative Hindu philosophy