by Judy Joyce

Created on: October 18, 2008

UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INTELLIGENCE AND WISDOM; More Than a Matter of Degree.

INTELLIGENCE-INTELLECT

Plato determined there were two worlds making up knowledge and the intelligible world. Intellect and that of sense. Sense can give only an imperfect knowledge of its object, but we can comprehend the world through intellectual faculties.From Plato, through Aristotle's contention that it was the function of the intellect is to divest the object presented by sense of its material and individualizing conditions, and apprehend the universal and intelligible form embodied in the concrete physical reality helps to explain somewhat that it was the belief of the ancient philosophers that the intellect appears in a double character. On the one hand it exhibits itself as an active agent, in that it operates on the object presented by the sensuous faculty rendering it intelligible. On the other hand, as subject of the intellectual representation evolved, it manifests passivity, modifiability, and susceptibility to the reception of different forms.(Plato's "Republic and sequels)

By the time we reach modern philosophy, especially Eingland, the radical distinction between the two orders of faculties begins to be lost sight of. Descartes, defended the spirituality of the soul so the intellect for Descartes is a spiritual faculty. Leibniz splits intellect into spirituality and innate efficiency.English philosophy moved into Sensationism and Materialism to explain intellect. This influenced the French.

Hobbes claimed the mind is material, and all knowledge is ultimately sensuous. Locke's attack on innate ideas and intuitive knowledge, his reduction of various forms of intellectual cognition with ideas originating in sense perception, and his representation of the mind as a passive tabula rasa, in spite of his allotting certain work to reflection and the discursive reason, paved the way for all modern Sensationism and Phenomenalism. Hume analyzed all mental Products into sensuous impressions, vivid or faint, plus association due to custom, developed the skeptical consequences involved in Locke's defective treatment of the intellectual faculty, and carried philosophy back to the old conclusions of the Greek Sensationists and Sophists, but reinforced by a more subtitle and acute psychology.(Treasury of World of Philosophy)

All the main features of Hume's psychology have been adopted by the whole Associationist school in England, by Positivists abroad, and by materialistic

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