Historical Background
The term, “the horizon,” derives from the Greek verb horizein, which one could roughly translate as “to divide,” “to delimit,” or “mark off by boundaries.” In Greek Antiquity, the term was primarily used with reference to astronomy. The Neo-Platonists incorporated this term into philosophy. We come across this term in The Book of Causes (Liber de causis), which was composed in the ninth century and in the Middle Ages falsely attributed to Aristotle. This book exerted an enormous influence on the philosophy of the Middle Ages. Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, and numerous other authors provided commentaries on this text and in this way appropriated the concept of the horizon in their own writings. In this book, whose content is closely tied to Proclus’ Elements of Theology, the concept of the horizon was incorporated into the doctrine of creation and emanation. Here we come across the claim that the human soul finds itself in the horizon of...
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Geniusas, S. (2023). Horizon, as a Concept in Phenomenology. In: de Warren, N., Toadvine, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47253-5_153-1
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