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.
Your soul existed before your birth, your soul will exist after your death.
Adamson feels that drug developers are unreasonably concerned about rare events. The reality is children tolerate phase I therapy new agents being tested to find the best dosage and possible side-effects as well as or better than adults, ... Once the initial studies are done that is, phase I trials in adults study should begin in children.
Plotinus is a neo-Platonist, so he would encourage us to go back to Plato.
When you're seeking after bodily pleasure of food and drink for example, this is going to prevent you from doing what you should be doing which is contemplating.
This condition of uncertainty and unrest in the Roman Empire might explain why at Plotinus' philosophy encourages us to sort of flee from the physical world and towards the world of ideas.
In fact Plotinus does believe in divine providence, though when he talks about divine providence, he talks about that providence being exercised by the intellect and the soul of the world, rather than the One.
There's going to be this realm of Platonic forms and then there's going to be this single mind, the 'nous', which grasps them.
Unlike later Neo-Platonists, Plotinus says that our souls are always connected to the universal intellect and that we never really fall away.
Who you really are, is an immaterial soul and the body is an external thing that's sort of an encrustation your soul. So this has important implications for Plotinus' ethics, because his ethics are basically all about encouraging us to turn away from the body and turn towards these higher principles, so universal soul, universal intellect and ultimately the One.
The idea is that to grasp an idea like equality or justice, you can't look at the equal and just or unjust things in the world around you, you have to somehow ascend to or maybe remember some kind of idea of equality and justice and this would be a Platonic form, and it would be different from the things that partake in the form.
Just the way you might look at a painting and see the painting, and the painting is outside you, so this immaterial intellect would see the forms and behold them, as if they were standing before it. And Plotinus said that that can't be right because it falls prey to sceptical objections.
Plato in his dialogue The Phaedo says that whereas sticks and stones are both equal and unequal, (so maybe what that means is that each stick is going to be equal to some other sticks and unequal to some other sticks, so equal to the stick on the left maybe but shorter than the stick on its right) the form of equal is going to be just equal, and it won't partake of inequality at all. And it will be the cause of equality in things that are equal, for example, equal sticks and stones.
People often talk about Plotinus' system. The reason they do this is that Plotinus postulated a kind of series or chain of principles, so at the top there's what he called the One. Below the One is what he called Intellect. Below Intellect is Soul, and the effect of the soul is the physical world that we actually live in.
There's a stronger and more kind of controversial element of Plotinus' view of matter, which is that he actually identifies it with evil, or at least the principle of evil, and the reason for this is that he thinks that the the One, the highest principle, can also be thought of as the Good, and that's kind of surprising like, because he has this negative theology which doesn't allow us to say anything about the One. But he believes that it can be seen as the principle of goodness as well as unity, and that if you think about it, goodness and unity sort of go along with each other.
I think it's important to realise that what happens in Neo-Platonism beginning with Plotinus and Porphyry and then going on for the next several centuries, is a real kind of contest for the ideas and convictions of the intelligentsia of the later Roman Empire. So that you have Christians slowly converting more and more powerful people until of course actually Constantine and then other emperors after him, become Christian, and the empire becomes a Christian empire rather than Pagan empire.
In fact one of the things about Plotinus is that he maybe not singlehandedly, but I think more than anyone else, killed off the variety and dissension among the philosophical schools of antiquity.
If you think about even very common examples like, say, something that you would build, like a clock or a car or a group of people trying to accomplish something, it fails when its unity breaks down. So when it stops having a single form, which is functioning all together, then it sort of falls apart into discrete elements.
We do each have an intellect but there's a universal intellect which is the same for everybody, as it were. And this single intellect is grasping the platonic forms.
We do have intellects and Plotinus controversially thought that even though we might not be aware of it, our souls are always connected to the intellect. They never fully descend as he would put it.
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 that bring out the argumentation and background of the work, is thus very much to be welcomed.
I'm sure that Plotinus wasn't that impressed by the Christians.
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 events that we talk about in contemporary philosophy of mind.
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 or the Qur'an or whatever religious text you're dealing with, why these statements are true.
Basically the problem is that if the intellect is looking at or beholding the forms, what it will get is some kind of representation or image of the forms, but it won't actually have the forms, it won't touch them as it were, or it won't incorporate them.
