The soul is the principle of life, and it's also something much closer to our own awareness and consciousness of our existence because fundamentally for Plotinus what we are is souls, we're not intellects.
Peter AdamsonThis 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.
Peter AdamsonThe world around you is some kind of distraction at best, and evil at worst, and you should be turning away from it.
Peter AdamsonPlotinus is usually called the Founder of Neo Platonism and what that means is that in this philosophical circle, he was founding a kind of renewed attempt to understand the thought of Plato which however they were combining with the thought of other philosophers, including Aristotle, the Stoics and Pythagoreans and so on.
Peter Adamson