Also, do inanimate material objects, like water, somehow relate to the World Soul? Doesn't difference imply some kind of particularizing/limitingprinciple, that is, something akin to matter (which as I understand it, the Indefinite Dyad is meant to signify)?

Select a purchase mainly because this is a damn fine, well-written podcast. I would say that of course in some sense you are right: individuals have to come from somewhere and nous is the only game in town. 8 in characterizing the souls descent as both necessary and voluntary. 2022 Project MUSE. For terms and use, please refer to our Terms and Conditions Like you, I enjoy studying the neoplatonists. I cant help but write that my undergraduates who recently wrote papers on Plotinus account of the descent of the soul would have benefitted greatly from Fleets commentary, as well as from the synopsis of the individual chapters that precedes the translation. Let's not forget that even those ancient philosophical schools which emphasized natural philosophy or ethics in the end also enveloped their more down-to-earth doctrines within some grand theological scheme. It is here where I think Fleets interpretive approach runs into problems since explaining these passages is not simply a matter of finding their sources in Plato but explaining how Plotinus reaches these doctrines within his own philosophy. If so, does this make the Nous, qua-duality, equivalent to the Dyad, but as a unified substance as the Monad (i.e, as a self-thinking entity)? How and why, Introduction 1. However, it does have its limitations. Recognizing that voluntariness involves not only acting according to our will and knowing the particulars of a situation (e.g., who one is murdering) but also knowing the universal (e.g., that murder is wrong) would help explain why souls would agree to compulsion in the first place. All this seems to imply thatPlotinus doesn't think of animals or plants as having (non-rational) souls, is this an area of disagreement with someone like Aristotle (who thinks the soul is materially reliant)? It is then that I believe most firmly that I am a part of the nobler realm, living a life of perfect activity; I have become at one with the divine, and being securely established in it I have entered into that higher actuality, setting myself above all the rest of the intelligible world. Sounds like you probably have MacKenna's translation; I'd rather recommend the Loeb one by Armstrong if you can get hold of it (a lot more expensive though, if you buy all 7 Loeb volumes).

I sympathise with the view that Plotinus has, from certain modern viewpoints, the appearance of drivel, but even if that were true, it would still be very important drivel. Fleets translation and commentary does a masterful job of exemplifying these features. I thought you meant searching the entire script for keywords. The hypostasis Soul 3. Basically you can think of the potentiality that becomes Nous as the indefinite Dyad and the One of course is the Monad (or perhaps the unity and determination it imposes on Nous). Not, unfortunately, in French. It is for this reason that Fleet devotes a significant portion of his introduction to explaining Platos teaching on these questions and Plotinus interpretation of them. :) And I hope your move to Germany goes without incident and that the podcasts resume on schedule. Armstrong, A. H. Tradition, Reason, and Experience in the Thought of Plotinus Plotino e il Neoplatonismo in Oriente e in Occidente, 1974, 171-194. In reply to Automatic search by Peter Adamson. One of my influences is the 13 years I endured in a Zen school (actually two of them, as I followed my teacher when he formed his own school). In recent years the Iamblicheans have been getting a better press and their texts have been examined with less prejudice and more care. It has the full range of Being, i.e. Fleet prefaces his commentary with a very helpful discussion of the strands in Platos thought that Plotinus is carefully interweaving. There is no transcript but there are published books which are pretty close to the podcasts. Project MUSE Ultimately, the reason for which one can deride the Neoplatonists - their dabbling in metaphysics - is also the reason for which Neoplatonism will never really go out of fashion. The questions are: first, what is the nature of soul; second, what is the nature of the souls ascent; and third, what does the soul achieve at the end of its ascent? 2. 1) What differentiates one Form (triangularity)from another within Nous (squareness)? Pp. Produced by Johns Hopkins University Press in collaboration with The Sheridan Libraries. Unity and creation: why Plotinus introduced the hypostasis Soul 2. The usual approach is to think of the Iamblicheans as retaining certain "philosophical" features from Plotinus while more generally exhibiting a decadent if not "Oriental" falling away into magic and superstition. I find this rather unfortunate since it is equally likely, if not more likely, that Plotinus reached this peculiar doctrine on the basis of his own phenomenological experience. Hopkins Fulfillment Services (HFS) Today The Journal has achieved worldwide recognition as a forum for international exchange among classicists and philologists by publishing original research in Greek and Roman literature; classic linguistics; and Greek and Roman history, society, religion, and philosophy. I ask because I am genuinely attractedto Middle- and Neo-platonism as philosophical systems and as someone who will be tasked with teaching on Platonism as a biblical scholar in the making, I want to be able to teach it in the most lucid and compelling way possible. Thanks yet again for another helpful response. If both, as it seems, is the Nous' duality ontologicallyprior to its multiplicity (which makes a kind of sense to me)? I will provide two examples of this in the remainder of the review. On p. 53n19 DK is cited but DK does not appear on the Abbreviations page. One does not want 1o.2 2 in the testimonia, but it should be discussed in relation to 7.14.9, where one issue is again how far Gellius gives his own reading of Plato's text. R. Chiaradonna (ed. Read your article online and download the PDF from your email or your account. Purchase this issue for $44.00 USD. This provides a helpful background to the problem Plotinus faces in IV. No counter argument. Great series, Thank you for the podcasts. If neo-platonism was the dominant school from the 3rd to the 15th centuries how many episodes of this are you going to have to wade through? And if, as a hard-nosed materialist, I want to argue against intelligent religious belief, then an understanding of its roots is necessary. On this last question, I think I vaguely remember learning that Plotinus thinks of the World Soul as teleology, and your last remarks in the video seem to make this point. Anddoes require a key word or phrase search engine be included on your website to find the metadata tags. The last point you make about his influence is definitely right (so there is a "know your enemy" possibility for materialists, as you suggest). 8: the picture presented at the start of IV.8 is of the human soul becoming assimilated to Intellect and engaging with the One by a sort of contact and timeless apprehension. Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at the Allen Institute for AI. In the commentary Fleet does briefly discuss how the ascent reveals the true nature of the soul and that this process begins by turning inwards, but he does not elaborate on the role of experience. P. Remes, Plotinus on Self: The Philosophy of the We (Cambridge: 2007). However Plotinus is famously obscure on the question of which aspects of the sensible world do not exist at the level of nous, especially in the context of explaining negativity or badness (to kakon). Many many thanks, I will get on with some reading. 147 and 157 the reference to Sedley is listed as 2007 but in the bibliography it is listed as 2004 (the original publication date was 2007). This is no small feat due to the density of Plotinus writing, and his lack of concern for spelling and grammar.1. For Plotinus, Soul is on the border between the physical and intelligible realms. And for that, I am eternally grateful to Professors like yourself for taking the time to bring philosophy to the masses so to speak. In reply to Plotinus by Ollie Killingback. His thesis, as it develops, is twofold: first, that theurgy is no magical manipulation of the gods by men, but a Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. What explains, to give different kinds of examples,the fact that humans tendtoward acquiring and using language, that dogs tend to sniff around a lot, that plants tend to sink their roots deep into the earth, and that water tends to freeze at a low temprature? But to follow with it for ten years, knowing that there is still a hella lot to cover. Is the hypostasis of Soul personal and living in away analogous to the Nous? Particularly helpful is the contrast Fleet highlights between the descent of the soul in the Republic and in the Phaedrus. I just find it awesome to see how you've been at this for nearly ten years, and are still releasing new stuff. And I can search my own scripts, which I actually do a lot to track down information! In reply to Plotinus on Soul by Jacques LaFave. ~96 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:2 APRIL ~997 to derive lessons from both sides of a Platonic argument; there must surely be some debt, general or specific, to Gellius' study of this work under Taurus, and it confirms an interpretative strategy of second-century Platonism. 1, 1-10).

Does Plotinus intergrate Neopythagorean numerology or the concept of the Monad-Dyad pairinto his metaphysics? Yes, the .mp3 files are tagged with descriptions and other metadata. What am I missing? Being undifferentiated is not a problem, everything is undifferentiated until a certain level of multiplicity is reached. 8. Since its founding in 1880 by Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, The American Journal of Philology has helped to shape American classical scholarship. Preferably something that focuses on the ideas, rather than splits textual hairs. PS--your comments made it sound like the Nous only has concepts that have actually been concretized in the material world, does the Nous not contemplate coherent concepts (like unicorns) that are in fact intelligible yet not materially instantiated? Avicenna is also super interesting on this by the way, check out episode 141. Again, caveat: that is only priority in a conceptual or causal sense, the whole process is eternally going on so it is not like there was ever only just matter, which then had to become Nous at a further stage that had not yet been realized. On pp. I've recently been studying their theory of Soul. So what I would say is this: Nous is fundamentally dual, as subject and object of thought. Fundamental to Fleets approach is his view that [k]ey to our interpretation of Plotinus text is an understanding of his interpretation of Platos texts (14). Hope you will keep enjoying the series! Some editorial mistakes are to be found.

A number of people, including the present reviewer, have seen these difficulties primarily as a crisis in Neoplatonic ethics. option.

Normally I re-listen at home with a paper and pen writing down vocabulary since english is not my first language, which is what I'll be doing now I guess. So what we are always after here is ways of thinking about this that affirm both the multiplicity of objects and the unity into which they are subsumed. One very common praxis in modern Zen is a form of self-interrogation very much like what you describe starting at 9:37 in this episode: one responds to seeing with "Who sees?" Souls are compelled to descend to fulfill the Demiurges plan of creating a cosmos that is perfect and complete in its embodiment of the Ideal Living Creature, but in so doing, souls discover that they want to descend to play their part in organizing and structuring the physical world. But actually I have to admit that what drew me to it at first, and still attracts me to it, is that the conclusions seem so surprising and for us nowadays remote from the realm of serious possibility. I am not gonna lie, what drove me here was the hope of being rewarded with a transcript for this episode which I failed to find (claimed?) Those are some pretty harsh and I think unfair words on Plotinus and the Neoplatonic endeavour. Hope to catch up with the new episodes soon. Can the hypostasis Soul error in its discursive temporal thinking, like humans can? So the upshot of this is very much like Aristotelian teleology, e.g. The present volume consists of an introduction to the series by the editors, and an introduction, translation, and commentary of Ennead IV. Later in Neoplatonism there is also the idea of the Limit and Unlimited which has a similar function. project for one of your grad students to undertake. Perhaps what is bothering you is not the arguments but where they wind up; so, if you are a hard-nosed materialist or empiricist obviously you will find Neoplatonism ridiculous in the end. This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. Thank you for such prompt and helpful replies. The answer seems to be pretty definitely "yes". As for their otherworldly matters, Neoplatonic negative theology constituted a powerful tool for describing things which are beyond direct sense-experience and it wouldn't surprise me if one could trace some Neoplatonic influence in later developments of theories of mind and consciousness. I've been wondering if such an argument for a Divine Mind has been proposed in the history of philosophy and would expecta middle/neoplatonist to have likely made one on the basis of the existence of intelligables. What is "moving" or "pulling", or dare I say, "besouling" these various things towards their respective ends, ends which, I suspect from your video comments, are to be identified as their respective eternal Forms (Forms which in turn takethem back to the One)? Berlin, 1952. It seems that individual souls are somehow parts of the hypostasis soul, which is one reason our own experiences give us insight into its nature, mode of thought, etc. In reply to Individuals in intellect by Peter Adamson. This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Access supplemental materials and multimedia. Second, his metaphysics seem to me to be what makes the religious thought of the Middle Ages and later possible. It is likely, however, that Plotinus was as much concerned with the soul's doing of evil as with its suffering it. How does Plotinus account for the goal-directedness of the world? The Forms are the realm of Being but also participate in the Good (= the One) so everything, insofar as it partakes of a Form, will be good insofar as it does that, and will also strive towards being a better instance of the Form it instantiates. But there often still remains an inability properly to interpret the ancient distinction between those "Neoplatonists" who followed what was sometimes dubbed a "philosophical" path (Plotinus and Porphyry), and the followers and successors of Iamblichus who were said to be more "theological." Finally, a comment on presentation. These features are especially relevant in the case of IV. Iamblichus rejected the Plotinian thesis that a part of the soul remains "undescended" and in contact with the intelligible world. I mean, it's one thing to propose to do the WHOLE history of philosophy without any gaps. The Journals Division publishes 85 journals in the arts and humanities, technology and medicine, higher education, history, political science, and library science. This is what makes it philosophy, as opposed to, say, poetically rapturous religious literature (which has its own value, no doubt, but is not something I'd include in the podcast). The Press is home to the largest journal publication program of any U.S.-based university press.