“People often talk about Plotinus' system. The reason they do this is that Plotinus postulated a kind of series or chain of principles, so at the top there's what he called the One. Below the One is what he called Intellect. Below Intellect is Soul, and the effect of the soul is the physical world that we actually live in.” PeopleWorldKindSoulReasonPrinciplesEffectsSeriesIntellectChains Author:Peter Adamson
“For Plotinus, what really exists are the Platonic forms, so the true nature or form of things like justice, beauty, maybe numbers, things like that, and these he associates with the intellect because they're the objects of intellect, they are things that intellect can think about.” ThinkingFormJusticeNumbersObjectsIntellectAssociatesTrue NaturePlatonic Author:Peter Adamson
“In fact Plotinus does believe in divine providence, though when he talks about divine providence, he talks about that providence being exercised by the intellect and the soul of the world, rather than the One.” WorldBelieveDoeSoulFactsDivineIntellectProvidenceDivine Providence Author:Peter Adamson
“Plotinus, when he thinks about mind or intellect, the Greek word is 'nous', he thinks about something that's very different, it's much more elevated and special, more abstract, you might say more philosophical than the very broad range of mental events that we talk about in contemporary philosophy of mind.” ThinkingMindDifferentPhilosophyMightSpecialEventsPhilosophicalIntellectContemporaryRangeGreekAbstractBroads Author:Peter Adamson
“We do each have an intellect but there's a universal intellect which is the same for everybody, as it were. And this single intellect is grasping the platonic forms.” FormUniversalIntellectGraspingPlatonic Author:Peter Adamson
“Just the way you might look at a painting and see the painting, and the painting is outside you, so this immaterial intellect would see the forms and behold them, as if they were standing before it. And Plotinus said that that can't be right because it falls prey to sceptical objections.” IfsWayLooksSaidMightFormFallPaintingStandingIntellectPreyObjections Author:Peter Adamson
“Basically the problem is that if the intellect is looking at or beholding the forms, what it will get is some kind of representation or image of the forms, but it won't actually have the forms, it won't touch them as it were, or it won't incorporate them.” IfsKindProblemFormIntellectRepresentation Author:Peter Adamson
“The soul is the principle of life, and it's also something much closer to our own awareness and consciousness of our existence because fundamentally for Plotinus what we are is souls, we're not intellects.” SoulExistenceConsciousnessPrinciplesAwarenessIntellect Author:Peter Adamson
“We do have intellects and Plotinus controversially thought that even though we might not be aware of it, our souls are always connected to the intellect. They never fully descend as he would put it.” SoulMightConnectedIntellect Author:Peter Adamson
“The soul must be distinct from intellect because even at its best, what the soul does when it's thinking, is it thinks linguistically, it thinks in a temporarily extended way, so it for example, might go through the steps of an argument chain, as if you were going through a syllogism and seeing that something followed from the premises, whereas intellect simply grasps the forms.” IfsThinkingWayDoeSoulMightFormStepsSeeingExampleArgumentIntellectChainsPremises Author:Peter Adamson
“What the soul is doing is kind of walking through the forms, and so our experience of thinking isn't normally this kind of pure intuitive insight that intellect gets, and that intellect must get right, because it's always identical to its objects, it's always the same as the forms that it's thinking about.” ThinkingKindSoulFormObjectsWalkingPureInsightIntellectIntuitiveIdentical Author:Peter Adamson
“Assuming there is an intellect, we're clearly not this universal intellect or we would know it. So that's one function of soul.” KnowsSoulUniversalFunctionAssumingIntellect Author:Peter Adamson
“This is in a way the most important thing about soul is that it's a kind of principle which mediates between the universal intellect and the material world.” WorldWayKindImportantSoulPrinciplesMaterialsUniversalImportant ThingsIntellectMaterial World Author:Peter Adamson
“The forms in intellect are some kind of blueprint or model on which the physical world is based, and something needs to come along and shape the matter in accordance with that blueprint. What does that is soul.” WorldNeedsKindDoeSoulMatterFormShapesModelsIntellectBlueprints Author:Peter Adamson
“Who you really are, is an immaterial soul and the body is an external thing that's sort of an encrustation your soul. So this has important implications for Plotinus' ethics, because his ethics are basically all about encouraging us to turn away from the body and turn towards these higher principles, so universal soul, universal intellect and ultimately the One.” ImportantSoulBodyTurnsPrinciplesHigherEthicsUniversalIntellectYour SoulImplications Author:Peter Adamson
“Unlike later Neo-Platonists, Plotinus says that our souls are always connected to the universal intellect and that we never really fall away.” SoulFallUniversalConnectedIntellect Author:Peter Adamson
