James Wilberding

At the start of his treatise On the Universe, Plotinus announces his interest in the everlastingness of the universe. Yet, Plotinus never questions that the universe is in fact everlasting. Rather, his examination is limited to the cause of this everlastingness.In my dissertation, I offer a slightly revised text as well as completely new translation of this examination. In addition, an introductory essay and a lengthy commentary serve both to illuminate Plotinus' thought and to set the discussion into the larger contexts of Plotinus' philosophy, and more generally of Platonism and Aristotelianism. As can be expected of commentaries, a considerable amount of space is devoted to a whole host of details that are only tangentially related to the treatise's main subject matter. ;As Plotinus realizes, there is a giant problem confronting a Platonist who wants to say that any sensible thing is everlasting. After all, a fundamental tenet of Platonism is that the sensible region is synonymous with coming-to-be and perishing with the apparent result that nothing in it can be everlasting. Nevertheless, Plotinus was convinced that the universe is everlasting. ;In order to establish this, Plotinus argues that both the universe, which Plotinus, like Plato, takes to be a living thing composed of body and soul, and the heavens suffer no external flux. The reasoning behind this is Aristotelian at heart: Material flux signals a lack of harmony between the living thing's body and soul. The union is in some sense unnatural so that the soul has to force the body to stay together as best it can, and this tension between the body and soul eventually manifests itself in the perishing of the living thing. Thus, external flux signals a tension between body and soul that inevitably leads to the composite living thing's destruction. Establishing that the universe suffers no flux is easy: Plotinus need only appeal to the fact that the universe has no exterior. In order to demonstrate this for the heavens, Plotinus shows that there is no exchange of matter between the heavens and the sublunar region

David Foster Wallace was genuinely troubled by what he perceived to be a serious incongruity in the mental lives of elite athletes. To perform with grace and beauty, elite athletes must be ‘geniuses,’ yet in conversation and prose these same athletes often exhibit such vapidity and banality that he was tempted to simply write them off as unintelligent or worse. In response to this puzzle, Wallace developed different philosophical conceptions of the elite athlete aimed at bridging the gap between genius and dumb jock. For Wallace, this was an exercise designed to help him live a more compassionate life.