Plotinus on the categories

Our main aim is to work through together as much as possible of Plotinus' three-book treatise On the Kinds of Being (Ennead VI, books 1-3), which includes a detailed criticism of Aristotle's Categories and an attempt to construct a new doctrine of the highest genera or kinds of being, and of their function as principles of other beings, out of Plato's Sophist. To make sense of this treatise, we will have to look not only at the primary texts that Plotinus is responding to, but also at Plotinus' philosophical program as he sets it out in easier treatises. Plotinus typically writes treatises "On F" in which, for some value of F, he investigates whether F exists "there" (= in the intelligible world), and, if so, in what ways it is like or unlike F "here" (= in the sensible world); in the process, he may also have to critically reexamine what F is "here." In all these treatises Plotinus tries to construct and defend a systematic Platonist account of the sensible and the intelligible worlds, answering traditional philosophical problems and trying to bring the reader to an intellectual grasp of the realities described. We will be concerned not only with his arguments but also with his interpretations of Platonic texts and his strategies for responding to Aristotle and the Stoics. In "easy," often early, treatises, Plotinus typically adapts Aristotelian arguments (often turning on the priority of actuality to potentiality) in order to defend, against Stoics and Stoicizing interpretations of Plato, a "high" doctrine of incorporeal principles (quality, soul, Nous, etc.): that is, he defends the distinctness of these different levels of being and avoids attributing to higher levels of being predicates appropriate only to lower levels, e.g. avoids describing souls as spatially extended or Nous as beginning to act in time, even when Plato apparently describes them in this way. Of these treatises we will read at least V,9, On Nous, Ideas and Being. In "hard," often later, treatises, including On the Kinds of Being, Plotinus tries to elaborate and defend a richer, distinctively Platonist, description of the intelligible world, against Aristotle's attempt to collapse it to a simple Nous without potentiality, motion, part-whole structure, or sufficient complexity to be a model for the sensible world. In On the Kinds of Being he uses a rethinking of Aristotle's thesis of the identity of knowledge with its object, and of Aristotle's thesis that the genus is a potentiality and the differentia is its actualization, to defend against Aristotle's challenges the Platonic claims that the genera are principles of other beings, that being itself is a genus, and that both motion and rest exist in the intelligible world. Besides this positive part of On the Kinds of Being, we will also look at some of Plotinus' criticisms of Aristotle's categories, and, if time permits, at some later neo-Platonist defenses of Aristotle against Plotinus, including Plotinus' criticism and Iamblichus' defense of Aristotle's distinction between activity and motion.

    This seminar will not work as an introduction to Greek metaphysics. We will presuppose knowledge of Aristotle, specifically the Categories, also De Anima III,4-5 and Metaphysics Θ and Λ, and of Plato, specifically the Sophist, although we will review crucially important passages of Plato and Aristotle together with the texts of Plotinus. Prof. Menn intends to speak in English, but the discussion may go back and forth between English and German. Knowledge of Greek is helpful but not presupposed (beyond the alphabet), but students must be ready to listen to discussions of the meanings of Greek technical terms, and to borrow those terms into English or German for the duration of the seminar. Students will have to actively participate in discussion, to have done the assigned reading before each meeting, and to have the texts in class and be ready to answer questions about them. The texts and assigned readings will be made available on a website which students will have to sign up for on the first day of class.