Ennead IV.7 ─ On the Immortality of the Soul

Ennead IV.7 is a very early treatise (second according to Porphyry’s chronological table), and unlike the many treatises devoted to attempts at untangling various issues Plotinus found problematic in Plato's thinking, this one presents the teachings of the other main schools current in Plotinus’ day: the Stoics, Epicureans, Pythagoreans, and Peripatetics, all of whom presented soul as something material or as contingent upon material soul, and so as being neither truly immortal nor imperishable. It includes observations on many mainly Stoic doctrines on perception, memory, sensation, thought, virtue, powers of material bodies, mixture and reproduction (Chapters 1–83); on Pythagorean attunement (84); and on Peripatetic entelechy (85). In Chapters 9–10 Plotinus presents, in broad terms, Plato’s doctrines on soul’s immortality—mainly that of the individual soul, but a fortiori that of the soul of the cosmos. These chapters offer some of Plotinus’ most powerful prose. He is not concerned to prove the soul’s immortality—that was an uncontroversial tenet of Platonism, to be taken for granted. In this treatise Plotinus is laying down the indisputable foundations for his later writings.

Barrie Fleet is affiliated Lecturer and former Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Plotinus: Ennead III.6 On the Impassivity of the Bodiless (Oxford, 1995), Plotinus: Ennead IV.8 On the Descent of the Soul Into Bodies (Parmenides, 2012), and three volumes in the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series edited by Richard Sorabji (Cornell/Duckworth): Simplicius: On Aristotle Physics 2 (1997), Simplicius: On Aristotle Categories 5 & 6, with Frans de Haas (2001), and Simplicius: On Aristotle Categories 7 & 8 (2002).