Giannis Stamatellos

Filling the void in the current scholarship, Giannis Stamatellos provides the first book-length study of the Presocratic influences in Plotinus' Enneads. Widely regarded as the founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus (204–270 AD) assimilated eight centuries of Greek thought into his work. In this book Stamatellos focuses on eminent Presocratic thinkers who are significant in Plotinus' thought, including Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the early Pythagoreans, and the early Atomists. The Presocratic references found in the Enneads are studied in connection with Plotinus' fundamental theories of the One and the unity of being, intellect and the structure of the intelligible world, the nature of eternity and time, the formation of the material world, and the nature of the ensouled body. Stamatellos concludes that, contrary to modern scholarship's dismissal of Presocratic influence in the Enneads, Presocratic philosophy is in fact an important source for Plotinus, which he recognized as valuable in its own right and adapted for key topics in his thought.

In Plotinus’s _Enneads_, the concept of harmony is mainly discussed in relation to intelligible beauty and musical melody, the Pythagorean doctrine of soul’s harmony, the universal harmony of the heavenly spheres, the nature of the perceptible bodies, and the correlation between virtue and harmony. Modern scholarship emphasizes the Platonic-Pythagorean elements of Plotinus’s _harmonia_. However, limited attention has been paid to the pre-Platonic origins of the concept of harmony in the _Enneads_ as well as its connection to Plotinus’s theory of virtue. The aim of this chapter is twofold: first, to explore Plotinus’s concept of harmony in light of Heraclitus’s concordance of opposites, and second, to compare Plotinus’s account of harmony to his virtue ethics. It is suggested that Plotinus’s _harmonia_ is not only found in musical harmony and the concordance of opposites but also to the virtue of justice as the harmonious concordance of the soul’s different parts.

The aim of this critical note is to discuss Heraclitus' use of analogy as a pattern of thought not only with argumentative value but also ontological and epistemological status. Heraclitus' analogy is of two kinds and is expressed in the use of the adverbs ὥσπερ ("as") and ὅκωσπερ ("just as"). The first is used as an explanatory device, while the second denotes the ontological homogeneity of logos. Analogy reveals not only the inherent opposition of logos in each single thing, but also the interdependent common interrelation between things.