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.
Peter AdamsonUnlike later Neo-Platonists, Plotinus says that our souls are always connected to the universal intellect and that we never really fall away.
Peter AdamsonWho 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.
Peter AdamsonThere's going to be this realm of Platonic forms and then there's going to be this single mind, the 'nous', which grasps them.
Peter AdamsonWhat 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.
Peter Adamson