Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads

"This is a very short and accessible introduction to Plotinus. One of the things I really like about it is that it brings out the excitement of Plotinus. It doesn’t just tell you what he thought. It looks at his ideas in a way that engages with the philosophy and isn’t afraid to ask, ‘what could Plotinus possibly mean by this highly metaphorical language? Can we really make sense of it?’ Another thing that I like about this book is that each chapter points the reader to a relevant chapter in Plotinus. This means that the book connects you with the text so you can explore it for yourself. O’Meara does this very well. So the book gives you a lively introduction to what’s exciting about Plotinus, what’s puzzling or peculiar about him, and it also encourages you to go and read Plotinus yourself to see what O’Meara is talking about. I would also like to mention here two other books that are not among my five, but that are nicely complementary to O’Meara’s. One is Eyjólfur Emilsson’s Plotinus , which is similar in scope and aim to O’Meara’s book but slightly more advanced. It would be a good thing to read after O’Meara. The other is Pierre Hadot’s Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision (in the original French, Plotin ou la simplicité du regard ). Hadot is especially good at bringing out the way in which, for Plotinus, philosophy is not only an intellectual exercise but also a way of life: a means to self-improvement and self-transformation. Plotinus wrote on a wide variety of themes within metaphysics , psychology and ethics . All of Plotinus’s writings were collected and edited by his student Porphyry, who called the collection ‘the Enneads ’. ‘Enneads’ means ‘nines’, and the name reflects the fact that Porphyry arranged Plotinus’s writings thematically, into six books, each including nine shorter treatises. There are some places where Porphyry’s attempt at thematic arrangement pulls apart things that one might think should be kept together. However, Porphyry also recorded for us the order in which these treatises were written, so as well as having the order in which Porphyry arranged them, we also know the order of their chronological production. Yes, Porphyry also wrote a short life of Plotinus, which tells us some interesting details about him. Of course, we can’t be sure how reliable it is. Porphyry wanted to paint a particular picture of his own relation to Plotinus. But it’s interesting to have the little details that we get from that portrait."