The One and Intellect

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521040549.016

Chapter 15 - The One and Intellect

from Part III - PLOTINUS

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Edited by

A. H. Armstrong

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Summary

It is now time to attempt a fairly systematic and detailed description of the universe in which, according to Plotinus, we find ourselves when we are wakened, recalled to our true self, and liberated into a genuine universality of experience by the kind of moral and intellectual self- discipline sketched in the last chapter. The thought of his Middle-Platonist and Neopythagorean predecessors, described in Part 1, formed the basis of the metaphysical speculations of Plotinus, but he worked over the pre-existing material available to him with such critical penetration and careful attention to his own mental experience that the resulting system was in many ways original, and far more coherent and attractive than anything to be found in Middle Platonism. This originality is particularly obvious in the account which Plotinus gives of the first principle transcending being from which all reality springs, the One or Good. There had already appeared in his predecessors, in a variety of more or less confused forms, the idea that the supreme principle of reality was beyond all determination or description. But Plotinus was the first to work out a coherent doctrine of the One or Good clearly distinguished from and transcending its first product, the divine Intellect (Νους) which is also real being in the Platonic sense, i.e. the World of Forms. In elaborating this doctrine it seems that, as so often happened, he was helped to clarify his mind by a critical consideration of Peripatetic thought about the simplicity of the divine intellect.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy , pp. 236 - 249

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521040549.016 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 1967

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