Soul puts the determination or forms or images of forms, into matter.

Who you really are, is an immaterial soul and the body is an external thing that's sort of an encrustation your soul. So this has important implications for Plotinus' ethics, because his ethics are basically all about encouraging us to turn away from the body and turn towards these higher principles, so universal soul, universal intellect and ultimately the One.

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.

The body distracts your soul.

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.

Assuming there is an intellect, we're clearly not this universal intellect or we would know it. So that's one function of soul.

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.