Catégorie : Plotin

Plotinus and Epicurus

Matter, Perception, Pleasure

Angela Longo, Daniela Patrizia Taormina (ed.),  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016

Description

This volume investigates the reasons why Plotinus, a philosopher inspired by Plato, made critical use of Epicurean philosophy. Eminent scholars show that some fundamental Epicurean conceptions pertaining to ethics, physics, epistemology and theology are drawn upon in the Enneads to discuss crucial notions such as pleasure and happiness, providence and fate, matter and the role of sense perception, intuition and intellectual evidence in relation to the process of knowledge acquisition. By focusing on the meaning of these terms in Epicureanism, Plotinus deploys sophisticated methods of comparative analysis and argumentative procedures that ultimately lead him to approach certain aspects of Epicurus’ philosophy as a benchmark for his own theories and to accept, reject or discredit the positions of authors of his own day. At the same time, these discussions reveal what aspects of Epicurean philosophy were still perceived to be of vital relevance in the third century AD.

(Text from the publisher)

Table of contents

Contributors

Preface

Abbreviations

Transliteration

Introduction – Angela Longo, Daniela Patrizia Taormina

Part I – Historical overview

Chapter 1 – The school and texts of Epicurus in the early centuries of the Roman empire – Tiziano Dorandi

Part II – Common anti-Epicurean arguments in Plotinus

Chapter 2 – The mention of Epicurus in Plotinus’ tr. 33 (Enn. II 9) in the context of the polemics between pagans and Christians in the second to third centuries AD – Angela Longo
Chapter 3 – Epicureans and Gnostics in tr. 47 (Enn. III 2) 7.29–41 – Manuel Mazzetti

Chapter 4 – ‘Heavy birds’ in tr. 5 (Enn. V 9) 1.8 – Mauricio Pagotto Marsola

Chapter 5 – Plotinus, Epicurus and the problem of intellectual evidence – Pierre-Marie Morel

Chapter 6 – ‘What is known through sense perception is an image’. Plotinus’ tr. 32 (Enn. V 5) 1.12–19 – Daniela Patrizia Taormina

Part III – Plotinus’ criticism of Epicurean doctrines

Chapter 7 – Corporeal matter, indefiniteness and multiplicity – Marco Ninci

Chapter 8 – Plotinus’ reception of Epicurean atomism in On Fate, tr. 3 (Enn. III 1) 1–3 – Erik Eliasson

Part IV – Epicurean elements in Plotinus

Chapter 9 – Athroa epibolē – Andrei Cornea

Chapter 10 – Plotinus and Epicurus on pleasure and happiness – Alessandro Linguiti

Bibliography

Index locorum

Index of modern authors

Index of main concepts

Link

http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2017/2017-01-54.html

Plotinus

 Myth, Metaphor, and Philosophical Practice

Stephen R. L. Clark, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016

Description

Plotinus, the Roman philosopher (c. 204-270 CE) who is widely regarded as the founder of Neoplatonism, was also the creator of numerous myths, images, and metaphors. They have influenced both secular philosophers and Christian and Muslim theologians, but have frequently been dismissed by modern scholars as merely ornamental. In this book, distinguished philosopher Stephen R. L. Clark shows that they form a vital set of spiritual exercises by which individuals can achieve one of Plotinus’s most important goals: self-transformation through contemplation. Clark examines a variety of Plotinus’s myths and metaphors within the cultural and philosophical context of his time, asking probing questions about their contemplative effects. What is it, for example, to “think away the spatiality” of material things? What state of mind is Plotinus recommending when he speaks of love, or drunkenness, or nakedness? What star-like consciousness intended when he declares that we were once stars or are stars eternally? What does it mean to say that the soul goes around God? And how are we supposed to “bring the god in us back to the god in all”? Through these rich images and structures, Clark casts Plotinus as a philosopher deeply concerned with philosophy as a way of life.

(Text from the publisher)

Table of contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

Part I: Prolegomena
1.         Why Read Plotinus?
2.         How to Read Plotinus
3.         Theories about Metaphor
4.         Dialectic

Part II: Metaphorically Speaking
5.         Naked and Alone
6.         On Becoming Love
7.         Shadow Plays and Mirrors
8.         Reason Drunk and Sober
9.         Dancing
10.       Remembering and Forgetting
11.       Standing Up to the Blows of Fortune

Part III: The Plotinian Imaginary
12.       Platonic and Classical Myths
13.       Spheres and Circles
14.       Charms and Countercharms
15.       Invoking Demons
16.       Images Within and Without
17.       Fixed Stars and Planets
18.       Waking Up

Part IV: Understanding the Hypostases
19.       Matter
20.       Nature
21.       Soul
22.       Nous
23.       The One

Part V: The Plotinian Way

Bibliography
Index of Passages from the Enneads
Index of Names and Subjects

Link

Version at BMCR home site

PLOTINUS

Ennead I.6: On Beauty. 

Smith (A.) (trans.), Las Vegas, Zurich and Athens: Parmenides Publishing, 2016

Description

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.

(Text from the publisher)

Link

https://www.parmenides.com/publications/publications-plotinus.html#smith

Plotinus on the Soul

Damian Caluori, Texas: Trinity University, 2015, 222 p.

Description

Plotinus on the Soul is a study of Plotinus’ psychology, which is arguably the most sophisticated Platonist theory of the soul in antiquity. Plotinus offers a Platonist response to Aristotelian and Stoic conceptions of the soul that is at the same time an innovative interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus. He considers the notion of the soul to be crucial for explaining the rational order of the world. To this end, he discusses not only different types of individual soul (such as the souls of the stars, and human and animal souls) but also an entity that he was the first to introduce into philosophy: the so-called hypostasis Soul. This is the first study to provide a detailed explanation of this entity, but it also discusses the other types of soul, with an emphasis on the human soul, and explains Plotinus’ original views on rational thought and its relation to experience.

(Text from the publisher)

Table of contents

Preface and ackmowledgements

Glossary

Introduction

Chapter 1 – Unity and creation: why Plotinus introduced the hypostasis soul

Chapter 2 – The hypostasis Soul

Chapter 3 – The hypostasis Soul and its relation to individual souls

Chapter 4 – The individual soul in the intelligible and in the sensible world

Chapter 5 – Divine individual souls

Chapter 6 – The human soul: its descent and its confusion in the sensible world

Chapter 7 – The human soul: the higher and the lower soul

Chapter 8 – The soul and the body

Bibliography

Indices

Index locorum

Link: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/plotinus-on-the-soul/E0A33B766C1CD8E4FDB114E13F1B8FF1#:~:text=Plotinus%20on%20the%20Soul%20is,innovative%20interpretation%20of%20Plato’s%20Timaeus.

The Enneads of Plotinus

A Commentary, Volume 1

Paul Kalligas, Elizabeth Key Fowden and Nicolas Pilavachi (trs.), New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014

Description

This is the first volume of a groundbreaking commentary on one of the most important works of ancient philosophy, the Enneads of Plotinus—a text that formed the basis of Neoplatonism and had a deep influence on early Christian thought and medieval and Renaissance philosophy. This volume covers the first three of the six Enneads, as well as Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, a document in which Plotinus’s student—the collector and arranger of the Enneads—introduces the philosopher and his work. A landmark contribution to modern Plotinus scholarship, Paul Kalligas’s commentary is the most detailed and extensive ever written for the whole of the Enneads. For each of the treatises in the first three Enneads, Kalligas provides a brief introduction that presents the philosophical background against which Plotinus’s contribution can be assessed; a synopsis giving the main lines and the articulation of the argument; and a running commentary placing Plotinus’s thought in its intellectual context and making evident the systematic association of its various parts with each other.

(Text from the publisher)

Table of contents

Preface to the English Edition – Paul Kalligas

Translator’s Preface – Nicolas Pilavachi

Main Abbreviations

Porphyry: On the Life of Plotinus and the Order of His Books

Plotinus: First Ennead

Second Ennead

Third Ennead

List of Variant Readings

Key to the Chronological Order of Plotinus’ Treatises

Suggested Further Readings on Individual Treatises

Figures

Index of Passages Cited With Their Abbreviations and Modern Editors

Link

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/he-enneads-of-plotinus-a-commentary-volume-1/