Porphyry and Plotinus’ Metaphysics

Steven K. Strange
Emory University

Τα μεταφυσικά του Πορφυρίου και του Πλωτίνου

 24grammata.com, read also: a) Plotinus and Aquinas on God
and b)  Plotinus on Eudaimonia. Πλωτίνος

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forthcoming in G. Karamanolis and A. Sheppard, eds. Studies in Porphyry

As editor and popularizer of his teacher Plotinus, as a founding figure of Neoplatonism, and as an important commentator on Plato and Aristotle, Porphyry deserves to be considered a major figure in the history of philosophy. But though a first-rate scholar of philosophy as well as of other fields—and as such a worthy successor to his first tutor in Platonic philosophy, the learned Longinus—it is much less clear to what extent Porphyry can be considered an original contributor to the development of ancient philosophy.1 Indeed, much of Porphyry’s extant work consists of excerpts, often extensive verbatim excerpts, from earlier writers: this is true of his De abstinentia, of his Pythagoras biography,2 and of his philosophical epistle to his wife, the Ad Marcellam, and it seems to hold as well of his extant commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories and on Ptolemy’s Harmonics, neither of which make any claim to originality and both of which seem only to wish to present older material in readily accessible form. Porphyry’s principal extant metaphysical work, the so-called Sententiae ad intelligibilia ducentes, in Greek Aφορμαί πρός τά νοητά (which might more precisely be rendered as “resources for…
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