Plotinus Ennead IV.7: On the Immortality of the Soul

Barrie Fleet

Plotinus Ennead IV.7: On the Immortality of the Soul
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Parmenides Publishing
Country
United States
Published
30 March 2016
Pages
349
ISBN
9781930972957

Plotinus Ennead IV.7: On the Immortality of the Soul

Barrie Fleet

Ennead IV.7 is a very early treatise (second according to Porphyry’s chronological table), and unlike the many treatises devoted to attempts at untangling various issues Plotinus found problematic in Plato’s thinking, this one presents the teachings of the other main schools current in Plotinus’ day: the Stoics, Epicureans, Pythagoreans, and Peripatetics, all of whom presented soul as something material or as contingent upon material soul, and so as being neither truly immortal nor imperishable.

It includes observations on many mainly Stoic doctrines on perception, memory, sensation, thought, virtue, powers of material bodies, mixture and reproduction (Chapters 1-83); on Pythagorean attunement (84); and on Peripatetic entelechy (85). In Chapters 9-10 Plotinus presents, in broad terms, Plato’s doctrines on soul’s immortality-mainly that of the individual soul, but a fortiori that of the soul of the cosmos. These chapters offer some of Plotinus’ most powerful prose.

He is not concerned to prove the soul’s immortality-that was an uncontroversial tenet of Platonism, to be taken for granted. In this treatise Plotinus is laying down the in disputable foundations for his later writings.

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