Plotinus on Intellect

by Emilsson, Eyjólfur Kjalar

• ISBN13: 9780199281701
• ISBN10: 019928170X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-04-12
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

Plotinus (205-269 AD) is considered the founder of Neoplatonism, the dominant philosophical movement of late antiquity, and a rich seam of current scholarly interest. Whilst Plotinus' influence on the subsequent philosophical tradition was enormous, his ideas can also be seen as theculmination of some implicit trends in the Greek tradition from Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Emilsson's in-depth study focuses on Plotinus' notion of Intellect, which comes second in his hierarchical model of reality, after the One, unknowable first cause of everything. As opposed to ordinary human discursive thinking, Intellect's thought is all-at-once, timeless, truthful and a directintuition into 'things themselves'; it is presumably not even propositional. Emilsson discusses and explains this strong notion of non-discursive thought and explores Plotinus' insistence that this must be the primary form of thought.Plotinus' doctrine of Intellect raises a host of questions that Emilsson addresses. First, Intellect's thought is described as an attempt to grasp the One and at the same time as self-thought. How are these two claims related? How are they compatible? What lies in Plotinus' insistence thatIntellect's thought is a thought of itself? Second, Plotinus gives two minimum requirements of thought: that it must involve a distinction between thinker and object of thought, and that the object itself must be varied. How are these two pluralist claims related? Third, what is the relation betweenIntellect as a thinker and Intellect as an object of thought? Plotinus' position here seems to amount to a form of idealism, and this is explored.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Emanation and Activity	p. 22
Internal and External Activity	p. 24
One or Two Acts?	p. 30
Motion and Activity in VI.1 and VI.3	p. 34
Absolute Motions	p. 38
The Case of Walking and its Trace	p. 42
Emanation and Internal and External Acts Again	p. 48
The Sources of the Double Act Doctrine I: Aristotle	p. 52
The Sources of the Double Act Doctrine II: Plato	p. 60
The Genesis of Intellect	p. 69
The Inchoate Intellect and its Conversion	p. 70
Kinds of Plurality or Otherness	p. 78
Analysis of V.3.10	p. 80
The Intellect's Undifferentiated Impression of the One	p. 90
Pre-noetic Experience and Mystical Union with the One	p. 101
The Two Kinds of Otherness Again	p. 103
Self-Thinking and the First Person	p. 107
Intellect and Being	p. 124
Cognition, Images, and the Real	p. 124
The Nature of Sense-Perception	p. 127
Evidence for Subjectivism or Idealism	p. 129
The Identity of Subject and Object in Intellect	p. 141
The Puzzles of Ennead V.3.5: Self-Thinking Revisited	p. 144
Being and Thought	p. 152
The Difference and Identity between Subject and Object	p. 157
Subordinate Intelligibles and Subordinate Intellects	p. 160
Truth in Intellect	p. 165
The Notion of the Given	p. 170
Plotinus' Idealism	p. 173
Discursive and Non-discursive Thought	p. 176
Non-discursive vs. Discursive Thought: the Main Contrasts	p. 177
Is Non-discursive Thought Propositional?	p. 185
Non-discursive Thought and Perceptual Imagery	p. 191
The Holism of Intellect	p. 199
Discursive Thought's Dependence on Intellect	p. 307
References	p. 214
Index of cited texts	p. 221
General index	p. 229
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