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 t….

Soul puts the determination or forms or images of forms, into matter..

What the soul is doing is kind of walking through the forms, and so our experience of thinking isn't normally this kind of pure intuitive insight tha….

The intellect must be different from the soul..

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 accompli….

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..

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 ….

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 implicati….

Sometimes clichés are true..

Plotinus thought that the entire world has a single soul. He also thought that each animal and plant and of course human, has an individual soul..

The world around you is some kind of distraction at best, and evil at worst, and you should be turning away from it..

In fact Plotinus does believe in divine providence, though when he talks about divine providence, he talks about that providence being exercised by t….

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….

In fact Plotinus thought not only that soul in general is eternal so that you always have soul, but he thought that each person's soul is eternal..

Al-Ghazali is the most important philosophical theologian of classical Islam, and Moderation in Belief is among his most important works. It sets out….

Before the 3rd century you're having several philosophical schools still as a going concern. You have not only the Platonists and the Aristotelians b….

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 goin….

If you think about for example, proportionality and beauty, things like that, these seem to be some kind of representations of a kind of unity..

Assuming there is an intellect, we're clearly not this universal intellect or we would know it. So that's one function of soul..

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 ….

Unlike later Neo-Platonists, Plotinus says that our souls are always connected to the universal intellect and that we never really fall away..