nous
Ancient Greek · νοῦς · nuːs
nous (νοῦς)
Nous is not “mind” as English now uses it. It is a power of seeing what cannot be counted.
- νοῦς / νόος
- mind, intellect, the power of grasping
Morphology
Greek νοῦς, also νόος. In Homer it can be a plan or a noticing. In Plato and Aristotle it becomes the faculty that grasps first principles. Plotinus makes it a hypostasis.
Semantic range
Intellect, intelligence, intuitive grasp, cosmic Intellect in Neoplatonism.
History of the word
Aristotle’s De Anima III.5, the active intellect, set a problem that Arabic and Latin commentators would not finish. Nous is not computation. It is closer to a seeing.
A key source
Aristotle
De Anima III.4–5.
Associated traditions
Parallels, not equivalents. Different attempts to notice something about knowing.
Latin
intellectus
The scholastic rendering; not a perfect fit.
Arabic
ʿaql
Intellect in falsafa; a technical term with its own map.
A distant linguistic echo
noesis
Greek · The act of nous; see noesis.
How the word shifts
English mind absorbed too much. Translating nous as mind hides the claim that some knowing is not stepwise.
mind / intellect
The non-discursive grasp; the cosmological uses in Plotinus.
A story where the word matters
Nearby words
Neighbors, not translations of one concept.
From this word
Is there a grasp that is not a calculation, and if there is, how would we know we had it?
One question remains
What does this word let us notice that English “consciousness” does not?
It lets us notice a knowing that is not a chain of reasons.