Plotinus

Plotinus was a third-century philosopher and the principal figure associated with Neoplatonism. His teachings describe reality as an emanation from the One and emphasise the soul’s return through intellectual and contemplative ascent.

Plotinus studied philosophy at Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas before travelling east with the emperor Gordian III’s Persian expedition and eventually settling in Rome. There he taught an influential circle of pupils and developed a philosophical system centred on the One, Intellect and Soul. He wrote his treatises comparatively late in life; after his death his student Porphyry edited and arranged them as the Enneads, through which Plotinus exercised a lasting influence on late antique, Christian, Islamic and later European philosophy.

The Enneads is the philosophical corpus through which Plotinus’s thought survives, arranged after his death by his student Porphyry from treatises written during Plotinus’s teaching career. The work develops the hierarchy of the One, Intellect and Soul and explores how the human mind may turn from the material world toward its ultimate source. Reading Plotinus here therefore means encountering his own arguments rather than a later biographical reconstruction, and the collection became foundational for the later Neoplatonic tradition.