The name “Ammonius Saccas” comes down to us as part of a line of intellectual succession, the last link in a chain connecting Plato to Plotinus. Plotinus of course formulated a systematic Neoplatonic philosophy that, though I am not an adherent, seems to be both impressive and important. But we have Plotinus’ texts to study and argue about. We don’t have any such thing for Ammonius Saccas. What we have is just the predicate that usually follows his name as subject. Saccas “taught Plotinus”. And we have THE NAME, which is fascinating in itself but tantalizing. The name “Saccas” could be a reference to the "Sakyas", an Indian ruling clan. From this possibility some have spun speculation on the presence of a Vedic element in lessons he taught Plotinus. Such visual representations as we possess allow for this speculation. He might be Indian -- he might be Egyptian -- he might be a Greek. Such speculation is a game anyone can play. See the image above to play along. I love the b...
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Last week I quoted Plotinus about how the soul may use the body as an instrument without thereby sharing the experiences of the body. In the comments beneath that post, one will see Henry's observation that, if "soul" here means "mind," the observation is unremarkable. If soul means something else, it is nonsensical. Allow me to expand. Plotinus is using "soul" here to mean "active intellect," and he is expounding on a distinction between the active and the passive intellect. Centuries before him, Aristotle had written in De Anima , that "knowledge in activity is identical with the subject; but knowledge in potentiality pre-exists in the individual...." That is one of the more mysterious of his observations! And no, more context would not resolve the mystery but would deepen it. Here is the context if you want it. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Vital_Principle/Book_3/Chapter_5 The "knowledge in potentiality" ...
Rest in peace Paul Kallagas. I read in Leiter's blog about his passing. Letter is just passing along what he encountered from a professor at McGill University. Kalligas has been the leading scholar on the work of Plotinus, a great Greek philosopher of the third century AD (or, if you prefer, CE). He wrote a thr ee volume commentary on Plotinus' major work, the ENNEADS. Kalligas writes in (modern) Greek, but two volumes of these three are available in English. Since this is our all-philosophy week, and since Kalligas would probably like it, let us quote a bit from Plotinus -- the founder of neoplatonism, a systematic re-working of Plato's Platonism. Plotinus is nowadays much more read about than read. Most of those of us who read philosophy, or even read about, philosophy at all have essentially left Plotinus' texts as a reservation for such scholars as Kalli gas. But let us read one paragraph together. Plotinus: We may treat of the Soul as in th...
Plotinus wrote that, yes, the sensible world is a mere imperfect copy of the intelligible world, but he also wrote against the pessimism of the gnostics, against the idea that the sensible world is a bad thing. He wrote thus: “what more beautiful image could there be? After the fire of the intelligible world, what better image of it could there be than our fire? What earth, outside of the intelligible earth, could be better than ours?" In short: yes, we live in a cave looking at shadows, but the cave is not at all a bad place to be. Those who aren't philosophers (most of the species, on Plotinian premises) can never get outside the cave, but that doesn't make their fate too dire. They get to look at all those fascinating shadows on the wall. Meanwhile for those few who can sometimes get out of the cave and look at the real world ands even glimpse the sun, those times are of necessity brief. We'll have to return to the cave. We can resign ourselves to th...
In my teen years, I went through a "Neo-Platonist" phase. I actually read the Enneads , the work of the most prominent Neo-Platonist, Plotinus. I was amused that the name seemed so fitting: did Plotinus just accidentally have a name that sounds like "Platonist"? Still not sure of that, Anyway, I burned through a good deal of notepaper writing obviously unprintable treatises of my own about how the Enneads rightly read can give us the answers to the problems of the 1970s, or something. I was doing this even after my first contact with the much saner writings of William James, though in time the latter rescued me from the former. Anyway, since this is my own bloomin' blog, I'll indulge myself and say a few words on Neo-Platonism. Paleo-Platonism Before every neo there is a paleo. what about paleo-Platonism and what in it led to the neo? Plato's dialogs were exploratory, digressive, dramatic, and not especially systematic or even consistent. ...