Plotinus on intellect / Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Plotinus.

Thought and thinking--Philosophy.

Thought and thinking.

Physical Description:

viii, 232 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2007.

Summary:

Plotinus (205-265) 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 the culmination 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, the unknowable first cause of everything. As opposed to ordinary human discursive thinking, Intellect's thought is all-at-once, timeless, truthful, and a direct intuition into 'the things themselves'; if 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 that Intellect'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 between Intellect 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.

Contents:

1 Emanation and Activity 22

1 Internal and External Activity 24

2 One or Two Acts? 30

3 Motion and Activity in VI.1 and VI.3 34

4 Absolute Motions 38

5 The Case of Walking and its Trace 42

6 Emanation and Internal and External Acts Again 48

7 The Sources of the Double Act Doctrine I: Aristotle 52

8 The Sources of the Double Act Doctrine II: Plato 60

2 The Genesis of Intellect 69

1 The Inchoate Intellect and its Conversion 70

2 Kinds of Plurality or Otherness 78

3 Analysis of V.3.10 80

4 The Intellect's Undifferentiated Impression of the One 90

5 Pre-noetic Experience and Mystical Union with the One 101

6 The Two Kinds of Otherness Again 103

7 Self-Thinking and the First Person 107

3 Intellect and Being 124

1 Cognition, Images, and the Real 124

2 The Nature of Sense-Perception 127

3 Evidence for Subjectivism or Idealism 129

4 The Identity of Subject and Object in Intellect 141

5 The Puzzles of Ennead V.3.5: Self-Thinking Revisited 144

6 Being and Thought 152

7 The Difference and Identity between Subject and Object 157

8 Subordinate Intelligibles and Subordinate Intellects 160

9 Truth in Intellect 165

10 The Notion of the Given 170

11 Plotinus' Idealism 173

4 Discursive and Non-discursive Thought 176

1 Non-discursive vs. Discursive Thought: the Main Contrasts 177

2 Is Non-discursive Thought Propositional? 185

3 Non-discursive Thought and Perceptual Imagery 191

4 The Holism of Intellect 199

5 Discursive Thought's Dependence on Intellect 307.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [214]-219) and indexes.

ISBN:

019928170X

9780199281701

OCLC:

73954029