front cover of PLOTINUS Ennead IV.4.30-45 & IV.5
PLOTINUS Ennead IV.4.30-45 & IV.5
Problems Concerning the Soul: Translation, with an Introduction and Commentary
Gary M. Gurtler, SJ
Parmenides Publishing, 2015
Ennead IV.4.30–45 and IV.5 retrieves the unity in this last section of Plotinus’ treatise on Problems concerning the Soul. Combining translation with commentary, Gurtler enhances both the accuracy of the translation and the recovery of Plotinus’ often unsuspected originality. This is especially true for IV.5, where previous translations fail to convey the concise nature of his argument against both the Aristotelian and Platonic theories of vision. Plato and Aristotle each claim that vision depends on the light between the eye and the object, but Plotinus presents evidence that this is not the case and develops a novel theory of light as a second activity that moves from source to object directly, even arguing that color is in the light itself rather than merely a quality of the object. This theory of vision, in turn, depends on the nature of sympathy developed especially in IV.4.30–45, where Plotinus shows how action at a distance is both possible and necessary for the proper unity in diversity of the sensible cosmos.
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front cover of Plotinus Ennead VI.9
Plotinus Ennead VI.9
On the Good or the One: Translation with an Introduction and Commentary
Stephen R. L. Clark
Parmenides Publishing, 2020
This early treatise is placed by Plotinus’ editor at the very end of the Enneads, as the culmination of his thought, matching Plotinus’ own last recorded instruction, “to bring the god in you back to the god in the all.” It is a cosmological sketch, arguing that the being of anything depends on its being unified by its orientation to its own good, and so also the being of Everything, the All. The One, or the Good, is at once the goal of all things both individually and collectively, and also the transcendent source of all that we experience, mediated through an intelligible order. But it is also, and perhaps more importantly, intended as a guide to the proper education and discipline of our own motives and experience. We are encouraged to put aside immediate sensory data, egoistic prejudice and sensual impulse, first to grasp at least a little of the intelligible order within which we all live, and at last to purge even those last intellectual attachments and experience what cannot be adequately described: the unity of being.
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