This article examines the presence of Plotinus in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. First, it presents the movement of indirect transmission of the Enneads throughout the Middle Ages and the editions that reappeared in the Renaissance. In this line, the presence and influence of Plotinus' ideas on medieval thinkers is discussed. Second, it unfolds certain core features of Plotinus' thought – the three hypostases and a single universe – and then, third, it exposes the profound coincidences that can be found in the structure of Nicholas of Cusa's thought – with the study of the language of the binomials complication-explanation, incontract-contract. Finally, it considers the possibility of including both authors in a Great Unified Theory that unfolds throughout the Middle Ages.
This article attempts to show that the Aristotelian view of soul was not absolutely limited to the entelechy theory. It further suggests that the irreducible opposition between the extreme formulations of the Platonic and Aristotelian positions was clearly recognised before Aquinas (in particular by Plotinus) and that an attempt was then made to "reconcile" the two theories.
In a recent article in Dionysius Jean-Marc Narbonne has taken me to task for my 1986 Phronesis article, "Is there more than one generation of matter in the Enneads?", in which I tried to show that certain difficult passages in the Enneads may well constrain us to accept that Plotinus views the generation of matter in several, rather different ways, and consequently that a rigid two-tier theory of matter, Intelligible and Sensible matter, is not entirely adequate to the subtlety and richness of all Plotinus' analyses. M. Narbonne, it seems, strongly disagrees with just about everything in my article, and what I want to do here is to answer his criticism point by point, and this for two reasons: firstly, because I do not recognize my own article in his criticism, in which I find my "position" misrepresented, and secondly, because M. Narbonne is altogether wrong in his assessment of the major passages in question.
In VI,4-5 Plotinus' theory of the omnipresence of all Being, self-dependent and undiminished in itself, leads him to develop the notion of the 'capacity of the recipient'. In particular, he uses the image of body's approach to soul - or rather, to be precise, the notion of an external nature which approaches and wraps itself around an intelligible core. This external nature comprises everything from the whole sensible man, as sensible, to the bare notion of body as body. Since this function of the Recipient is found in treatises other than VI,4-5, and since the image of 'approach' is in fact only one of a family of metaphors, it is of the greatest importance to any understanding of Plotinus' view of body (and thus its 'relation' to soul) to examine what is meant by 'approach' and to provide some firm basis of reference for the usage of these related metaphors in the Enneads.
In several passages of the Enneads, Plotinus is openly critical of Aristotle. In IV.7,8, he rejects the soul-entelechy theory; in II.4.14, he criticises the function of the three principles, from, privation and matter, and in III.7, he rejects the Physics definition of time. But the locus classicus of this explicit criticism is the long work, VI,1-3, dividd by Porphyry into three treatises, which constitutes a sustained attack upon the ten Aristotelian categories as genra of being. In the opening chapters of VI.1, it is argued that sensible and intelligble substance can not on Aristotelian principles form one genus, and in the critique of substance in VI.3,1-8, Plotinus concludes that sensible substance can only be "an aggregate of qualities and matter", not true substance, but an imitation. This will also be Porphyry's view.
It is often remarked that one cannot imagine the Unmoved Mover loving or caring for anything—and, in fact, this is the gist of both Christian and atheist attacks on Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover. Richard Dawkins, for instance, reminds us that even if God is the end of the regress of movement, this does not mean we can ascribe to such a principle properties that are normally considered divine, such as omniscience, goodness, creativity in design, answering prayers, forgiving sins, and so on (The God Delusion, Boston, 2006, 110). In other words, any adoption of versions of the cosmological or teleological arguments, such as we might find at the beginning of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, do not lead to the Christian notion of God as personal, loving and caring; and, of course, on Dawkins’ well known view, the Christian loving God is a chimera, anyway, a product of wishful human thinking.