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. — Peter Adamson Copy Share Image
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… — Peter Adamson Copy Share Image
Plotinus thought that the entire world has a single soul. He also thought that each animal and plant and of course human, has an… — Peter Adamson Copy Share Image
Assuming there is an intellect, we're clearly not this universal intellect or we would know it. So that's one function of soul. — Peter Adamson Copy Share Image
The body is some kind of image of you, it's kind of something that's just attached to your soul, some kind of outside principle,… — Peter Adamson Copy Share Image
The forms are part of the mind, or really are the mind, they're just the contents of this universal night. — Peter Adamson Copy Share Image
Before the 3rd century you're having several philosophical schools still as a going concern. You have not only the Platonists and the Aristotelians but you have Scepticism, you have Stoicism, you even have a little bit of Epicureanism. And what happens after Plotinus is that everybody becomes a Neo-Platonist. So if we then go forward to the Islamic world for… — Peter Adamson Copy Share
Unlike later Neo-Platonists, Plotinus says that our souls are always connected to the universal intellect and that we never really fall away. — Peter Adamson Copy Share
The forms in intellect are some kind of blueprint or model on which the physical world is based, and something needs to come along… — Peter Adamson Copy Share Image
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… — Peter Adamson Copy Share Image
Al-Ghazali is the most important philosophical theologian of classical Islam, and Moderation in Belief is among his most important works. It sets out al-Ghazali's Ash?arite theology with unusual clarity and provides important background for such well-known works as his autobiographical Deliverance from Error and his attack on Avicenna in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. This first English-language translation, with notes… — Peter Adamson Copy Share
In fact Plotinus thought not only that soul in general is eternal so that you always have soul, but he thought that each person's… — Peter Adamson Copy Share Image
Basically the problem is that if the intellect is looking at or beholding the forms, what it will get is some kind of representation… — Peter Adamson Copy Share Image
