“Life here with the things of the earth is a sinking, a defeat, a failing of the wing.” Quote by Plotinus
“Plotinus is usually called the Founder of Neo Platonism and what that means is that in this philosophical circle, he was founding a kind of renewed attempt to understand the thought of Plato which however they were combining with the thought of other philosophers, including Aristotle, the Stoics and Pythagoreans and so on.” KindMeanPhilosophicalIncludingPhilosopherCirclesFoundersPlatoFoundingCombining Author:Peter Adamson
“The importance of Plotinus is not only his own philosophical ideas which are quite interesting, but his historical impact as the founder of neo-Platonism which is the main philosophical tradition of late antiquity.” IdeasInterestingLateTraditionImportancePhilosophicalImpactHistoricalFoundersAntiquity Author:Peter Adamson
“This condition of uncertainty and unrest in the Roman Empire might explain why at Plotinus' philosophy encourages us to sort of flee from the physical world and towards the world of ideas.” WorldIdeasPhilosophyMightConditionsUncertaintyEmpiresRoman EmpireUnrest Author:Peter Adamson
“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
“Once you're in a kind of revealed religious tradition, you wind up having to explain how the things said about God in the Bible or the Qur'an or whatever religious text you're dealing with, why these statements are true.” KindSaidReligiousWindTraditionStatementsReligious TraditionsReligious Texts 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
