Online Library of Liberty

Person

Portrait of Plotinus

Plotinus

205–270

Plotinus is regarded by many modern philosophers as one of the founders of Neoplatonism. He is primarily remembered for his teachings, which were collected by Porphyry into a volume called the Enneads. This work gives Plotinus’s accounts of the religions and cults of his age. His own religious beliefs inclined toward the idea that one could achieve a spiritual union with the good (understood as the Platonic idea of a perfect realm of the ideal) through philosophic reflection.