the sun
object · 8 works · 10 mentions · 15 anchored passages
sun · sunlight · الشمس · Round Badge of the day · Sol · al-shams · ethereal sun · many-rayed · one luminary · skiey sun
spoken of as
1 expressionSun2 mentions
De Rerum Natura (Latin) · Memorabilia (Greek)
With constant flux of radiance ever new,
in the texts
Mukhtaṣar fī ʻilm al-nafs al-insānīyah
The sun, used twice: as the overwhelming object that disables the eye and so distinguishes sense from intellect, and as one term in the celestial analogy for the diversity of souls.
Likewise it befalls the senses that they cannot apprehend the weak after the strong, as with one who looks a long while at the disc of the sun and is thereafter unable to apprehend a lamp set before him
“The souls of mankind are one and all different by nature [10], and there is no accord among them save in the accidents of the virtues and the vices — after the manner of the natures of the sun, the moon and the stars, and the natures of the birds and the rest”
for just as (4) the sun, when it shines upon a polished body such as a burnished and brightened mirror or transparent crystal, that [71] ray shines by reflection from it upon a body facing that first body — so too the Creator, exalted be He, or an angel of the separate intellects, when He shines with His lights upon the souls of His holy ones, they are illumined and give light.
De Rerum Natura
The sun, treated as a physical object whose annual path, daily rising, and periodic eclipses are given multiple rival naturalistic explanations.
Of the whole starry Zodiac, through which
That sun, in winding onward, takes a year,
Far occultations rightly thou mayst deem
Lucullus
The sun, treated as an object of philosophical dispute regarding its size, nature, and divine status.
Cleanthes, who is as it were a Stoic of the greater clans, the pupil of Zeno, thinks that the sun rules and holds power over things:
You too say that there are men over against us, on the contrary part of the earth, who stand with feet opposed to our feet, whom you call antipodes:
nor will they more affirm that that statue is six feet, if they shall have measured it, than that the sun, which they cannot measure, is more than eighteen times larger than the earth.
Funeral Oration
The sun, invoked as a simile for Athens's beneficent and ordering influence over Greece.
Compare her with the sun which visits the whole world and duly separates the seasons, disposing all things for the best, with provision, where men are virtuous and prudent, for their birth and nurture, the crops and all the other needs of life;
Republic
The sun in the upper world of the allegory, ultimately seen directly by the freed prisoner and understood as cause of all visible things
But, at any rate, my dream as it appears to me is that in the region of the known the last thing to be seen and hardly seen is the idea of good, and that when seen it must needs point us to the conclusion that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful, giving birth in the visible world to light, and the author of light and itself in the intelligible world being the …
“And at this point he would infer and conclude that this it is that provides the seasons and the courses of the year and presides over all things in the visible region, and is in some sort the cause of all these things that they had seen.
Consolation to Marcia
The sun, described in Nature's cosmic speech as marking out day, night, and the seasons.
you will see one luminary, the sun, fill all things, marking out by his daily course the spaces of day and night, and by his yearly course dividing summers and winters more evenly still.
On Benefits
Celestial body invoked in the debate over whether beings that act by natural necessity can still confer a benefit on humanity.
" But since they are moved for this, that they may preserve the whole, they are moved for me too;
Memorabilia
Heavenly body whose observable effects are used to reject Anaxagoras' account.
that their skin is blackened by the sun’s rays, but not by fire.