Abstract

It is appropriate that, following volumes devoted to Plato and Aristotle, the latest Cambridge Companion on an ancient Greek philosopher should be about Plotinus, who is generally regarded as the first fully fledged Neoplatonist thinker of antiquity, and of whom it can be reasonably claimed that he "is probably the dominant philosopher in the 700-year period between Aristotle and Augustine of Hippo". That claim—like the term "Neoplatonism" itself—is distinctly modern: as Martha Nussbaum rightly insists, the tradition of Western thought from Descartes to Marx owes more to the Hellenistic philosophers—Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics—than any other ancient thinkers. The importance of Plotinus and other Neoplatonists to certain Western thinkers—the Florentine Platonists of the fifteenth century, the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists, the Idealist Berkeley in the eighteenth century, Hegel, German and English Romantic writers —has long been recognized, and modern scholarship has delineated the influence of Plotinus, his disciple and editor Porphyry, and the fifth-century Neoplatonist Proclus on some authors of late antiquity whose prestige in the mediæval period was paramount: Augustine, Macrobius, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Plotinus's complex style and method have become considerably more accessible, thanks to the magisterial critical edition of his Enneads by Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer. Readers of English now have a generally reliable translation, based on the Henry-Schwyzer text, by A. H. Armstrong, and two outstanding commentaries on individual treatises, by Michael Atkinson and Barrie Fleet. It is, therefore, a good time to take stock of Plotinus's philosophical achievement in a volume of this kind.