Online research in philosophy

In this paper, Plotinus' treatise On Dialectic I.3 [20] is discussed. In the first part of the paper, I argue that for Plotinus the importance of dialectic stands in the method of division that enables one to grasp the ‘what it is’. I present and examine some passages which contain a description of dialectic and an account of its activity. I then look into the reasons why Plotinus affirms the superiority of dialectic, as he conceived it, over logic, as the Peripatetics and the Stoics conceived it. The second part of the paper explores the relation between dialectic and truth and that between dialectic and soul: in this discussion Plotinus offers some interesting and more original epistemological remarks.

This paper focuses on Plotinus’ account of the soul’s cognitive powers of sense perception and discursive thought, with particular reference to the treatises 3. 6 [26], 4. 4 [28] and 5. 3 [49] of the Enneads . Part 1 of the paper discusses Plotinus’ direct realism in perception. Parts 2 and 3 focus on Plotinus’ account of knowledge in Enneads 5. 3 [49] 2–3. Plotinus there argues that we make judgements regarding how the external world is by means of discursive reasoning. This latter claim, however, is in tension with what Plotinus argues elsewhere regarding our perceptual apprehension of the external world (3. 6 [26] 1; 4. 4 [28] 23). This puzzle is addressed in Part 3 of the paper, which investigates Plotinus’ view that there exist some sense perceptions of which we are unaware. Finally, Part 4 looks at Plotinus’ understanding of Plato’s famous wax block analogy, in 5. 3 (49). The overall conclusion of the paper is that Plotinus’ account of knowledge is radically different from that of the Cartesian tradition.

Plotinus' formulation of the problem of the individual should not be reduced to the question of whether or not one can accept Forms of Individuals. First, if Plotinus does indeed posit an intelligible foundation of individuality, there are no grounds to identify this foundation with a Form: it must rather be considered a logos. Second, we must, in addition to this intelligible “principle of distinction”, allow for a sensible “principle of individuation”: the living body. Finally, we have to distinguish a third level: that of the hêmeis, the individual as a person, capable of freedom and consciousness. This latter's compatibility with the other two seems problematic, so that the real difficulty may lie in this tension, in Plotinus' thought, between an ontological and an ethical concept of the individual.

Plotinus (205-269 AD) led the philosophical movement of Neoplatonism, which reinterpreted Plato's thought later in antiquity and went on to become a dominant force in the history of ideas. Emilsson's in-depth study of Plotinus' central doctrine of Intellect caters for the increasing interest in Plotinus with philosophical clarity and rigor.

This paper challenges the traditional view that Plotinus identifies matter and evil. A rational reconstruction of Plotinus’s tenets should neither accept the paradox that evil comes from Good, nor shirk the arduous task of interpreting Plotinus’ texts on evil as a fitting part of his philosophy on the whole. Therefore, I suggest a reading of evil in Plotinus as the outcome of an incongruent interaction of matter and soul, maintaining simultaneously that neither soul nor matter are to be considered as bad or evil. When Plotinus calls matter evil, he does so metonymically denoting matter’s totally passive potentiality as perceived by the toiling soul trying to act upon it as a form-bringer. As so often, Plotinus speaks of matter per se which, as mere potentiality (and nothing else) is not nor can be evil. In short, matter is no more evil than the melancholy evening sky is melancholy—not in itself (for it isn’t), but as to its impression on us who contemplate it.

In five sections, this book describes cultural, personal, argumentative, religious and philosophical situations of togetherness, thus providing an imaginative ...