Abstract

If it were permitted by the editors, my comment could be titled, Plotinus: Thinker of Radical Matter. I will attempt to present Plotinus’s complex view of matter in II 4[12], which examines the nature of matter as the substrate in relation to the corporeal, with the different relation of qualitative and quantitative qualities to bodies and matter, and the consequent difference in the application of privation, ugly and evil to matter. An examination of comments about matter as the principle of evil contrary to the Good and as the cause of the weakness of the soul in I.8[51].6 & 14 do not introduce any radical change in Plotinus’s understanding of matter. Radical matter remains so precisely as formless.