Items in this handout:
                                    
1    Rene Descartes (1595-1645) Rules for Direction of the Mind        1
2    Apocrypha, Wisdom of Solomon, In Praise of Wisdom           2-3
3    Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus, The Ways of Wisdom                     4
4    Apocrypha, Esdras, A Debate at the Persian Court            5-6
5    Old Testament, Judith 11,12,13, Judith Kills Holophernes          7
6    Old Testament, Isaiah, Israel a Light to the Nations              8
7    New Testament, Matthew 5, 6, The Sermon on the Mount         9
8    Gospels, St. Paul, Romans: The Gospel According to St. Paul      9, 10
9    Epictetus, The Golden Sayings of Epictetus, XXV - XXXVI          11-12
10   Marcus Aurelius, (120-160 AD) The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius     13
11   John Woolman (1700-1770) The Journal of John Woolman        14-16
12   Benjamin Franklin (1700's) Autobiography and Collected Papers    12-22

   
   Most of the passages are from:
     The New English Bible with the Apocrypha, Oxford Study Edition, Oxford, Oxford
                              University Press.
     The Harvard Classics, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

                                  
                                       Students interested in an HTML project: I would like to have all of these relevant
passages (and many more) on the NYU machines and anchored to the syllabus. A student
could click and get the entire text of the article, or click and get just the passages I want them
to focus on, or perhaps click and get an annotated version of some of the text with my
                   comments integrated into the text.
     You would have to do the research on the Internet using the search routines of the
browsers in order to find the articles, the correct translations, and so on.
     You should also consider the passages in this handout to be only a start and an
illustration of what I want. I am interested in neo-Platonist and Wisdom literature that bears
     on the mind-body problem as it was presented by the Cartesians.     The central doctrine of Cartesian linguistics is that the general features of grammatical
structure are common to all languages and reflect certain fundamental properties of the mind.
It is this assumption which led the philosophical grammarians to concentrate on  grammaire
generale rather than grammaire particuliere and which expresses itself in Humboldt's belief
that deep analysis will show a common "form of language" underlying national and individual
variety. There are, then, certain language universals that set limits to the variety of human
language. The study of the universal conditions that prescribe the form of any human
language is "grammaire general." Such universal conditions are not learned, rather, they
provide the organizing principles that make learning possible, that must exist if data is to lead
to knowledge. By attributing such principles to the mind, as an innate property, it becomes
possible to account for the quite obvious fact that the speaker of a language knows a great
deal that he has not learned. (Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics, pp. 59-60)
                                    
     ...It seems to me quite possible that at that particular moment in the development of
Western thought [the Cartesian period, 1600-1700] there was the possibility for the birth of a
science of psychology of a sort that still does not exist, a psychology that begins with the
problem of characterizing various systems of human knowledge and belief, the concepts in
terms of which they are organized and the principles that underlie them, and that only then
turns to the study of how these systems might have developed through some combination of
innate structure and organism-environment interaction. (Chomsky, Language and Mind, p. 7)