Wise Man

El 6 de enero en los países latinos es muy conocida la fiesta de los Reyes Magos rememorando la visita de los tres reyes magos al niño Jesús y ofreciéndole los regalos más valiosos. En España, a partir del siglo xix se inició la tradición de convertir la noche de Reyes en una fiesta infantil con regalos para los niños, a imitación de lo que se hacía en otros países el día de Navidad. En Colombia por ejemplo, es una festividad que hace tributo a esta epifanía como símbolo de sabiduría y descubrimiento de la llegada del Hijo de Dios a este mundo.

Esa es la historia que año tras año va quedándose en la tradición de todos nosotros y que iremos replicando hasta el día de nuestra muerte, sin embargo, ¿qué podemos profundizar al respecto?. En el presente artículo se presentarán algunos datos científicos y de corte cristianos que darán un poco más de amplitud sobre los detalles de los Reyes Magos.

Star of bethehem, the wise men from the east, Jesus born, Christmas, King Phraates, King Herod, Augustus, Bibel, Luke,
The wise men from the East and the Star of Bethlehem .
--- Ecbatana versus Babylon
-) Who were the wise men?
-) Where they spys? Can a natural star convey a divine message?
-) Did the star really stand still?
King Phraates IV reigned in 7 BC already in the 31st year over the great empire of the Parthians. Reluctantly, he closed in the year 20 BC. with Kaiser Augustus a peace treaty, which set the border to the Roman Empire on the Euphrates. The associated loss of land and the humiliation hurt him. Rome was too powerful to attack again, but subversive means were welcome to destabilize the neighbouring imperial provinces and thereby weaken Rome.
In the former capital Ecbatana, which was conveniently located on the Silk Road, there was not only a lot of trade but also a time-honoured university. Ecbatana is now called Hamdan, a city in western Iran.

In two passages in 1 Corinthians, 6:12-20 and 10:23–11:1, Paul affords us a unique opportunity to observe the reasoning processes whereby his ethical principles are ascertained and practically applied. Both texts begin with what appears to be a quotation of a community slogan, “all things are permitted for me,” which was seemingly proffered in defense of an antinomian, libertine lifestyle (6:12; 10:23). Though this maxim was quite possibly deduced from Paul’s teaching, those espousing it in the Corinthian community apparently had failed to recognize the absolute claim of Jesus on the lives of his followers, as well as his servant ethos. In 6:12 and 10:23 Paul dialogues with and qualifies the bold assertion, and then applies the now severely conditioned “freedom to do all things” to two pertinent issues: sex with prostitutes (6:13-20) and the consumption of food offered to idols (10:24–11:1). In the ensuing matched pair of ethical enquiries, Paul, the self-professed “Apostle to the Gentiles,” shapes and defines the Christian ethic according to the two tables of the Mosaic law (possibly as mediated by the double love command of the Jesus tradition: Mark 12:29-30). In so doing, he shifts the focus from the “rights” of the autonomous individual to the duties and responsibilities inherent in the Christ-oriented community. He also thereby provides the Corinthians with a paradigmatic reasoning process for making ethical choices.

The focus of this chapter is not so much on a philosophical subject or theme as
on a philosophical term, one of the most conspicuous of all, given the absence
of the word philosophia in Ovid’s vocabulary: sapiens. In offering an overview
of Ovid’s poetry— his erotic, epic, and exilic works— I shall concentrate in particular
on passages that touch on the semantic field of sapiens/ sapientia. My specific
goal is to establish (i) whether there is any sort of evolution of this idea
throughout and across his works; (ii) whether any such evolutionary process is
linked with larger philosophical issues, and, if so, how that linkage works; and
(iii) whether Ovid can in some way be regarded as a sapiens himself.

The treatment of the second kind of knowledge, that is, reason in Spinoza’s Ethics is problematic because there are two different explanations which do not necessarily go well together (cf. Bennett, 1984). On the one hand, there is the claim that reason is based on common notions (E2p38-39), On the other hand, there is the claim that reason is ordered according to the order of the intellect (E2p18, Wilson, 1996), which seems to be the same claim as the one made in E2p11c according to which ideas of reason have a right kind of relationship to God’s intellect (Renz, 2010).
In my presentation, I approach the problem of the second kind of knowledge in the general framework presented by Renz (Renz, 2010) where common notions referring to geometrical-mechanical features underlying physical ones allow us to build a scientific understanding of properties of objects (Renz forthcoming). However satisfying is this description in the theoretical level, it is still not clear how knowledge of these basic geometrical features is supposed to provide practical scientific knowledge, as well as serve as the basis of the ethical character of the wise man. Therefore, I would like to present a phenomenological approach based on Spinoza’s treatment of agreement in nature (cf. Sangiacomo, 2015) and argue that what are common to the perceiver and the perceived change dynamically based on the conscious mental life of the perceiver.
More precisely, I argue that the term “equally in the part and in the whole” means that the given property is the essence of a mode which takes part in the relation constituting the essence of the individual. The ideas of these modes constitute the conscious experience of the given mind and they allow it to form adequate ideas about external objects. Based on the treatment of the conscious experience of infants (Nadler, 2008), I argue that phenomenally speaking the modes involved in the relation defining the essence of the individual constitute the scope of attention of the human mind. Thus, a shift in the attention is the same thing as the reordering of the parts of the human body, which rearranges the list of those natures which the human mind can actually understand in the given moment. However, this does not have to mean that those natures with which the body in the moment cannot accord in nature are forever out of reach for the human mind, since given the right nutrition (E4p45c2s, E4app27) it can accord in nature with all those natures that are required. The main constrain on the capacity of understanding of the mind is the number of natures with which it can accord at the same time (E2p13c, E2p14, E2p39c, E2p40s1, E4p38, E5p39), which fits well with Cartesian discourse on the possibility or impossibility to keep in mind all elements of a whole chain of inference. Also, it helps to accommodate both descriptions of the second kind of knowledge and provide further insights on the role of knowledge of God in the Ethics as presented in E2p11c.