Preface

I. The Enneads

"But neither his writings nor Porphyry's description of his teaching (Life, 13 and 18) have any suggestion of the dry, tidy, systematic, authoritarian presentation of the scholastic text-book." viii

"...[Porphyry] arranged the treatises according to subject-matter and not in chronological order. In fact, a division of Plotinus's works according to subject-matter is bound to have a great deal that is arbitrary in it because Plotinus does not, as has already been remarked, write systematically; there is no tidy separation of ethics, metaphysics, cosmology, and psychology in his treatises." ix-x

"...the student of his ethics must be familiar with the Sixth (and all other) Enneads as well as the First," x

"...the First Ennead has an ethical emphasis," x

II. The Thought of Plotinus

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