Gospels of Thomas and Philip and Truth - Syriac Christian Church

linguistic capacity of children (thus Noam Chomsky) to understand, generate and
transform new sentences in the language.
X. Children, however, assuredly learn single words before they learn sentences;
so individual words are indeed primitive in language. Now, since a word is an image
(sound, inscription, etc.), we might raise the question whether there is a significant
logical parallel between such ordinary linguistic icons and computer icons. For the
latter— far from being mere pictures— represent files of programs as well as of data;
so we might hypothesize that a word is a type of image which designates a file either
of data (including images) or of a program. Thus men will, quite naturally, have made
computers as simplified models of their own rationality. (Cf. Alan Turing, ‘Computing
Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind 1950: ‘In the process of trying to imitate an adult
human mind, we are bound to think a good deal about the process which has
brought it to the state that it is in’; NB: ordinary language and life are generally
analog, i.e. have continuous rather than digital truth-functions, whereas modern
computers function in a binary calculus.)
XI. Such a unique and extraordinary metaphysic, which might be called Spiritual
Idealism, has significant parallels with (1) the Neoplatonism of Plotinus in his
Enneads; (2) George Berkeley's philosophy of Subjective Idealism, according to
which ‘sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind or spirit; whence ...
there must be some other Mind wherein they exist’ [Three Dialogues between Hylas
and Philonous]; (3) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz' schema of ourselves as monads
‘mirroring’ the Universe, with God as the Supreme Monad [Monadology 56]; (4) the
ego/phenomena analysis of Immanuel Kant, where the ‘unity of consciousness
preceding all empirical data,... the transcendental unity of apperception’ is in
essential polarity with ‘the [sensory] manifold of all our intuitions’ [Critique of Pure
Reason A1067]— see especially his eloquent ‘transcendental hypothesis’ [A779/
B807]; (5) Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.64, Notebooks
1914-1916 [7.VIII.16 2.IX.16], and Philosophical Investigations [#373, ‘Theology as
grammar’]; (6) Martin Buber's I and Thou— see also William James's prior The Will
to Believe: ‘The universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious’;
(7) Hans Reichenbach's The Philosophy of Space & Time [Dover Books, New York,
n/d]; (8) Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception; and (9) much
traditional Oriental epistemology: Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist [recall Th 30!]— thus
e.g. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism [2nd Series]: ‘The entire
123