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.

We do each have an intellect but there's a universal intellect which is the same for everybody, as it were. And this single intellect is grasping the platonic forms.

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

The world around you is some kind of distraction at best, and evil at worst, and you should be turning away from it.

Plotinus 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.

I think it's important to realise that what happens in Neo-Platonism beginning with Plotinus and Porphyry and then going on for the next several centuries, is a real kind of contest for the ideas and convictions of the intelligentsia of the later Roman Empire. So that you have Christians slowly converting more and more powerful people until of course actually Constantine and then other emperors after him, become Christian, and the empire becomes a Christian empire rather than Pagan empire.

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