v. 1. The ethical treatises, being the treatises of the first Ennead with Porphyry's Life of Plotinus, and the Preller-Ritter extracts forming a conspectus of the Plotinian system. Psychic and physical treatises; comprising the second and third Enneads.--v. 2. On the nature of the soul [being the foruth Ennead] The divine mind, being the treatises of the fifth Ennead. On the One and Good being the treatises of the sixth Ennead.

Plotinus was convinced of the existence of a state of supreme perfection and argued powerfully that it was necessary to guide the human soul towards this state.

Ennead VI.8 gives us access to the living mind of a long dead sage as he tries to answer some of the most fundamental questions we in the modern world continue to ask: are we really free when most of the time we are overwhelmed by compulsions, addictions, and necessities, and how can we know that we are free? Can we trace this freedom through our own agency to the gods, to the Soul, Intellect, and the Good? How do we (...) know that the world is meaningful and not simply the result of chance or randomness? Plotinus' On the Voluntary and on the Free Will of the One is a groundbreaking work that provides a new understanding of the importance and nature of free human agency. It articulates a creative idea of agency and radical freedom by showing how such terms as desire, will, self-dependence, and freedom in the human ethical sphere can be genuinely applied to Intellect and the One while preserving the radical inability of all metaphysical language to express anything about God or gods. (shrink)

Ennead IV.4.30-45 and IV.5 retrieves the unity in this last section of Plotinus' treatise on Problems concerning the Soul. Combining translation with commentary, Gurtler enhances both the accuracy of the translation and the recovery of Plotinus' often unsuspected originality. This is especially true for IV.5, where previous translations fail to convey the concise nature of his argument against both the Aristotelian and Platonic theories of vision. Plato and Aristotle each claim that vision depends on the light between the eye and (...) the object, but Plotinus presents evidence that this is not the case and develops a novel theory of light as a second activity that moves from source to object directly, even arguing that color is in the light itself rather than merely a quality of the object. This theory of vision, in turn, depends on the nature of sympathy developed especially in IV.4.30-45, where Plotinus shows how action at a distance is both possible and necessary for the proper unity in diversity of the sensible cosmos. (shrink)

"Ennead I.6 is probably the best known and most influential treatise of Plotinus, especially for Renaissance artists and thinkers. Although the title may suggest a work on aesthetics and thus of limited focus, this is far from the case. For it quickly becomes apparent that Plotinus' main interest is in transcendent beauty, which he identifies with the Good, the goal of all philosophical endeavor in the Platonist's search to assimilate himself with the divine. The treatise is at once a philosophical (...) search for the nature of the divine and at the same time an encouragement to the individual to aspire to this goal by taking his start from the beauty which is experienced in this world; for it is an image of transcendent beauty. This upward movement of the treatise reflects throughout the speech of Socrates in Plato's Symposium in which he recounts the exhortation of the priestess Diotima to ascend from earthly to transcendent beauty, which for Plotinus is identified with the divine.". (shrink)

Ennead IV.7 is a very early treatise, where Plotinus presents the teachings of the main schools current in his day: the Stoics, Epicureans, Pythagoreans, and Peripatetics, all of whom presented soul as something material and neither truly immortal nor imperishable. It includes observations on many mainly Stoic doctrines on perception, memory, sensation, thought, virtue, powers of material bodies, mixture and reproduction; on Pythagorean attunement; and on Peripatetic entelechy. In Chapters 9-10 Plotinuspresents Plato's doctrines on soul's immortality--mainly that of the individual (...) soul, but a fortiori that of the soul of the cosmos. These offer some of his most powerful prose. Plotinus is not concerned to prove the soul's immortality--an uncontroversial tenet of Platonism--but rather with laying down the indisputable foundations for his later writings. (shrink)

For Plotinus, the nature and status of the human soul is one of the central problems of philosophy.Ennead IV.3­–4.29 constitutes his most penetrating enquiry into this topic, addressing the issues of the relation of the individual soul to the World Soul, the descent of the soul into body, its relations with that body, problems of personal identity and the nature of memory, sense perception, and the true seat of the emotions —many of which still have a resonance today. The treatise (...) is an excellent example of Plotinus' distinctive method of enquiry: not dogmatic (though he is no sceptic), but worrying away at questions until he has uncovered their complexities to the best of his ability. Such a work requires detailed commentary, such as is provided here, to tease out fully the fascinating convolutions of his thought. (shrink)

Ennead VI.4-5, originally written as a single treatise, contains Plotinus' most general and sustained exposition of the relationship between the intelligible and the sensible realms, addressing and coalescing two central issues in Platonism: the nature of the soul-body relationship and the nature of participation. Its main question is, How can soul animate bodies without sharing their extension? The treatise seems to have had considerable impact: it is much reflected in Porphyry's important work, Sententiae, and the doctrine of reception according to (...) the capacity of the recipient, for which this treatise is the main source, resonated in medieval thinkers. (shrink)

A translation and commentary on Plotinus' Ennead VI.9 on the Good, being the treatise chosen by Porphyry as the culmination of Plotinus' Collected Works.

Plotinus' Treatise V.1 comes closer than any other to providing an outline of his entire spiritual and metaphysical system, and as such it may serve to some degree as an introduction to his philosophy. It addresses in condensed form a great many topics to which Plotinus elsewhere devotes extended discussion, including the problem of the multiple self; eternity and time; the unity-in-duality of intellect and the intelligible; and the derivation of intelligible being from the One. Above all, it shows that (...) the so-called "three hypostases"--soul, intellect, and the One--are best understood not as a sequence of three things additional to one another, but as three levels of possession of the same content, so that each lower level--soul in relation to intellect and intellect in relation to the One--is an "image" and "expression" of its superior. Plotinus exhorts the human soul to overcome its alienation from its own true nature and its divine origin by first recognizing itself as superior to the body and the same in kind as the animating principle of the entire cosmos, and then discovering within itself the still higher levels of reality from which it derives: intellect and, ultimately, the One or Good, the supreme first principle of all things. To do so the soul must redirect its attention inward and upward to become aware of the divinity which is always within it but from which it is distracted by the clamor of the senses. (shrink)

Ennead I.1 is a succinct and concentrated analysis of key themes in Plotinus' psychology and ethics. It focuses on the soul-body relation, discussing various Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic views before arguing that there is only a soul-trace in the body (forming with the body a "compound"), while the reasoning soul itself is impassive and flawless. The soul-trace hypothesis is used to account for human emotions, beliefs, and perceptions, and human fallibility in general. Its problematic relation to our rational powers, as (...) well as the question of moral responsibility, are explored. Plotinus develops his original and characteristic concept of the self or "we," which is so called because it is investigated as something common to all humans (rather than a private individual self), and because it is multiple, referring to the reasoning soul or to the "living thing" composed of soul-trace and body. Plotinus explores the relation between the "we" and consciousness, and also its relation to the higher metaphysical entities, the Good, and Intellect. (shrink)

The Enneads by Plotinus is a work which is central to the history of philosophy in late antiquity. This volume is the first complete edition of the Enneads in English for over seventy-five years, and also includes Porphyry's Life of Plotinus. Led by Lloyd P. Gerson, a team of experts present up-to-date translations which are based on the best available text, the editio minor of Henry and Schwyzer and its corrections. The translations are consistent in their vocabulary, making the volume (...) ideal for the study of Plotinus' philosophical arguments. They also offer extensive annotation to assist the reader, together with cross-references and citations which will enable users more easily to navigate the texts. This monumental edition will be invaluable for scholars of Plotinus with or without ancient Greek, as well as for students of the Platonic tradition. (shrink)

Teilband 1. Schriften 1-38 -- Teilband 2. Schriften 39-54, Porphyrios: Über Plotins Leben.

_"The Essential Plotinus_ is a lifesaver. For many years my students in Greek and Roman Religion have depended on it to understand the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages. The translation is crisp and clear, and the excerpts are just right for an introduction to Plotionus's many-layered view of the world and humankind’s place in it." --F. E. Romer, University of Arizona.

Le commentaire constitue, outre une synthèse, un éclaircissement méthodique de la métaphysique et de la mystique plotinienne.

Die Beiträge zur Altertumskunde enthalten Monographien, Sammelbände, Editionen, Übersetzungen und Kommentare zu Themen aus den Bereichen Klassische, Mittel- und Neulateinische Philologie, Alte Geschichte, Archäologie, Antike Philosophie sowie Nachwirken der Antike bis in die Neuzeit. Dadurch leistet die Reihe einen umfassenden Beitrag zur Erschließung klassischer Literatur und zur Forschung im gesamten Gebiet der Altertumswissenschaften.

After concluding in the introduction that different things are beautiful in different ways, the first section of the treatise focuses on sensory beauty or beauty of bodies. Rejecting symmetry as a sufficient criterion for beauty, Plotinus explains that things in this world are beautiful to the extent that they participate in form and to the extent that shapeless matter is dominated by shape and the formative principle. Sensory beauty stirs the soul and helps it to recognise and remember transcendental beauty.

Part of a series of facsimile reprints chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth. Taylor's translation of Plotinus was originally published in 1792. Distributed by Books International. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.