Plotinus thought that the entire world has a single soul. He also thought that each animal and plant and of course human, has an individual soul.

What the soul is doing is kind of walking through the forms, and so our experience of thinking isn't normally this kind of pure intuitive insight that intellect gets, and that intellect must get right, because it's always identical to its objects, it's always the same as the forms that it's thinking about.

Al-Ghazali is the most important philosophical theologian of classical Islam, and Moderation in Belief is among his most important works. It sets out al-Ghazali's Ash?arite theology with unusual clarity and provides important background for such well-known works as his autobiographical Deliverance from Error and his attack on Avicenna in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. This first English-language translation, with notes that bring out the argumentation and background of the work, is thus very much to be welcomed.

This is in a way the most important thing about soul is that it's a kind of principle which mediates between the universal intellect and the material world.

Once you're in a kind of revealed religious tradition, you wind up having to explain how the things said about God in the Bible or the Qur'an or whatever religious text you're dealing with, why these statements are true.

We do have intellects and Plotinus controversially thought that even though we might not be aware of it, our souls are always connected to the intellect. They never fully descend as he would put it.

When you're seeking after bodily pleasure of food and drink for example, this is going to prevent you from doing what you should be doing which is contemplating.