Children
group · 9 works · 11 mentions · 12 anchored passages
children · al-aṭfāl · الاطفال · a boy · daughters · infant · infants · little children · sons · the child
in the texts
Mukhtaṣar fī ʻilm al-nafs al-insānīyah
The young, whose moist cerebral temperament is given as the physiological reason why instruction is prescribed for them rather than for the aged.
For this reason instruction was laid down for children, so that the sciences may be firmly rooted in their inward powers by reason of the moisture that prevails in those [14] powers;
The first is called the material intellect (*al-ʻaql al-hayūlī*), like the soul of children, empty [23] of all the sciences and cognitions yet prepared to receive them in potentiality and possibility.
Memorabilia
Descendants who benefit from the honors and livelihood gained by fit men.
get great glory and gain very high honours, and for this cause live henceforth a pleasanter and better life, and leave to their children better means of winning a livelihood.
Therefore those who produce children in such circumstances produce them wrongly?
In that case then, they ought not to have children?
Nicomachean Ethics
Young persons used as an analogy for undisciplined desire that must be governed by reason or authority.
The word Profligacy or wantonness we also apply to the naughtiness of children, which has some resemblance to the licentiousness of adults.
Hence our indulgences should be moderate and few, and never opposed to principle— this is what we mean by well-disciplined and chastened —;
For children, like profligates, live at the prompting of desire;
On Moral Ends
Children, treated throughout the passage as natural evidence for the philosopher's claims about innate dispositions toward action, knowledge, and virtue.
and on that account little children are moved, without teaching, by the likenesses of the virtues, of which they have the seeds in themselves;
For little children at first lie, at their birth, as if altogether without mind.
Children show it, in whom, as in mirrors, nature is discerned.
Epigrams
Offspring described as an adornment or honor for a man.
Children are a man’s crown, towers of a city;
Hymn 30 to Earth
The offspring whose joy and vitality display the blessing Earth gives to households.
Through you, O queen, men are blessed in their children and blessed in their harvests, and to you it belongs to give means of life to mortal men and to take it away.
To Nicocles
Children are the king's descendants, for whom a good name matters more than riches and whose imagined instruction should guide his own conduct.
Whatever advice you would give to your children, consent to follow it yourself.
Consider it more important to leave to your children a good name than great riches;
Natural Law, or the Science of Justice
Used as an illustrative example of natural, intuitive knowledge of justice acquired before formal learning.
Children learn the fundamental principles of natural law at a very early age.
On the Steadfastness of the Wise Man
Human children, used throughout as an extended analogy for the folly and harmlessness of those who might insult the wise man.
For children, too, strike their parents' faces, and the infant tousles and tears its mother's hair and bespatters her with spittle, or lays bare in the sight of her household what should be covered, and does not spare obscene words—and none of these do we call insult.
We have come to such absurdity that we are tormented not only by pain but by the notion of pain, like children, in whom a shadow strikes fear, and the ugliness of masks, and a distorted face;
Therefore those who have gone further are on a level with children, but their error is in other and greater matters.