Author: Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019928170X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Plotinus (205-269 AD) is considered the founder of Neoplatonism, the dominant philosophical movement of late antiquity, and a rich seam of current scholarly interest. Whilst Plotinus' influence on the subsequent philosophical tradition was enormous, his ideas can also be seen as the culmination of some implicit trends in the Greek tradition from Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.Emilsson's in-depth study focuses on Plotinus' notion of Intellect, which comes second in his hierarchical model of reality, after the One, unknowable first cause of everything. As opposed to ordinary human discursive thinking, Intellect's thought is all-at-once, timeless, truthful and a direct intuition into 'things themselves'; it is presumably not even propositional. Emilsson discusses and explains this strong notion of non-discursive thought and explores Plotinus' insistence that this mustbe the primary form of thought.Plotinus' doctrine of Intellect raises a host of questions that Emilsson addresses. First, Intellect's thought is described as an attempt to grasp the One and at the same time as self-thought. How are these two claims related? How are they compatible? What lies in Plotinus' insistence that Intellect's thought is a thought of itself? Second, Plotinus gives two minimum requirements of thought: that it must involve a distinction between thinker and object of thought, and that the object itselfmust be varied. How are these two pluralist claims related? Third, what is the relation between Intellect as a thinker and Intellect as an object of thought? Plotinus' position here seems to amount to a form of idealism, and this is explored.
Author: David J. Yount
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472575237
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
In this insightful new book David J. Yount argues, against received wisdom, that there are no essential differences between the metaphysics of Plato and Plotinus. Yount covers the core principles of Plotinian thought: The One or Good, Intellect, and All-Soul (the Three Hypostases), Beauty, God(s), Forms, Emanation, Matter, and Evil. After addressing the interpretive issues that surround the authenticity of Plato's works, Plotinus: The Platonist deftly argues against the commonly held view that Plotinus is best interpreted as a Neo-Platonist, proposing he should be thought of as a Platonist proper. Yount presents thorough explanations and quotations from the works of each classical philosopher to demonstrate his thesis, concluding comprehensively that Plato and Plotinus do not essentially differ on their metaphysical conceptions. This is an ideal text for Plato and Plotinus scholars and academics, and excellent supplementary reading for upper-level undergraduates students and postgraduate students of ancient philosophy.
Author: D. M. Hutchinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108627137
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Plotinus is the first Greek philosopher to hold a systematic theory of consciousness. The key feature of his theory is that it involves multiple layers of experience: different layers of consciousness occur in different levels of self. This layering of higher modes of consciousness on lower ones provides human beings with a rich experiential world, and enables human beings to draw on their own experience to investigate their true self and the nature of reality. This involves a robust notion of subjectivity. However, it is a notion of subjectivity that is unique to Plotinus, and remarkably different from the Post-Cartesian tradition. Behind the plurality of terms Plotinus uses to express consciousness, and behind the plurality of entities to which Plotinus attributes consciousness (such as the divine souls and the hypostases), lies a theory of human consciousness. It is a Platonist theory shaped by engagement with rival schools of ancient thought.
Author: Lloyd P. Gerson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139825259
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 482
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Book Description
Each volume of this series of companions to major philosophers contains specially commissioned essays by an international team of scholars, together with a substantial bibliography, and will serve as a reference work for students and non-specialists. One aim of the series is to dispel the intimidation such readers often feel when faced with the work of a difficult and challenging thinker. Plotinus was the greatest philosopher in the 700-year period between Aristotle and Augustine. He thought of himself as a disciple of Plato, but in his efforts to defend Platonism against Aristotelians, Stoics, and others, he actually produced a reinvigorated version of Platonism that later came to be known as 'Neoplatonism'. In this volume, sixteen leading scholars introduce and explain the many facets of Plotinus' complex system. They place Plotinus in the history of ancient philosophy while showing that he was a founder of medieval philosophy.
Author: Mark J. Nyvlt
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739167758
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
This book emphasizes that Aristotle was aware of the philosophical attempt to subordinate divine Intellect to a prior and absolute principle. Nyvlt argues that Aristotle transforms the Platonic doctrine of Ideal Numbers into an astronomical account of the unmoved movers, which function as the multiple intelligible content of divine Intellect. Thus, within Aristotle we have in germ the Plotinian doctrine that the intelligibles are within the Intellect. While the content of divine Intellect is multiple, it does not imply that divine Intellect possesses a degree of potentiality, given that potentiality entails otherness and contraries. Rather, the very content of divine Intellect is itself; it is Thought Thinking Itself. The pure activity of divine Intellect, moreover, allows for divine Intellect to know the world, and the acquisition of this knowledge does not infect divine Intellect with potentiality. The status of the intelligible object(s) within divine Intellect is pure activity that is identical with divine Intellect itself, as T. De Koninck and H. Seidl have argued. Therefore, the intelligible objects within divine Intellect are not separate entities that determine divine Intellect, as is the case in Plotinus.-- Book Description from Website.
Author: Svetla Slaveva-Griffin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199703744
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
Plotinus on Number studies the fundamental role which number plays in the architecture of the universe in Neoplatonic philosophy. This book draws attention to Platinus' concept as a necesscary and fundamental link between the Platonic and the late Neoplatonic theories of number.
Author: Zeke Mazur
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004441719
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
In The Platonizing Sethian Background of Plotinus’s Mysticism, Zeke Mazur offers a radical reconceptualization of Plotinus with reference to Gnostic thought and praxis. A crucial element in the thought of the third-century CE philosopher Plotinus—his conception of mystical union with the One—cannot be understood solely within the conventional history of philosophy, or as the product of a unique, sui generis psychological propensity. This monograph demonstrates that Plotinus tacitly patterned his mystical ascent to the One on a type of visionary ascent ritual that is first attested in Gnostic sources. These sources include the Platonizing Sethian tractates Zostrianos (NHC VIII,1) and Allogenes (NHC XI,3) of which we have Coptic translations from Nag Hammadi and whose Greek Vorlagen were known to have been read in Plotinus’s school.
Author: Stephen Gersh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108415288
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
Using a series of case-studies from across European philosophical traditions, this book traces the influence of Neoplatonism over the centuries.
Author: Pauliina Remes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521204989
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Plotinus, the founder of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy, conceptualises two different notions of self (or 'us'): the corporeal and the rational. Personality and imperfection mark the former, while goodness and a striving for understanding mark the latter. In this text, Dr Remes grounds the two selfhoods in deep-seated Platonic ontological commitments, following their manifestations, interrelations and sometimes uneasy coexistence in philosophical psychology, emotional therapy and ethics. Plotinus' interest lies in what it means for a human being to be a temporal and a corporeal thing, yet capable of abstract and impartial reasoning, of self-government and perhaps even invulnerability. The book argues that this involves a philosophically problematic rupture within humanity which is, however, alleviated by the psychological similarities and points of contact between the two aspects of the self. The purpose of life is the cultivation of the latter aspect, the true self.
Author: Nicholas Banner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108688748
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Plotinus, the greatest philosopher of Late Antiquity, discusses at length a first principle of reality - the One - which, he tells us, cannot be expressed in words or grasped in thought. How and why, then, does Plotinus write about it at all? This book explores this act of writing the unwritable. Seeking to explain what seems to be an insoluble paradox in the very practice of late Platonist writing, it examines not only the philosophical concerns involved, but the cultural and rhetorical aspects of the question. The discussion outlines an ancient practice of ‛philosophical silence' which determined the themes and tropes of public secrecy appropriate to Late Platonist philosophy. Through philosophic silence, public secrecy and silence flow into one another, and the unsaid space of the text becomes an initiatory secret. Understanding this mode of discourse allows us to resolve many apparent contradictions in Plotinus' thought.
