This chapter analyzes Plotinus’ connection of dialectic to grasping Intellect’s holistic unity. It examines how Ennead III 7 links the dialectical method to the unity of the Greatest Kinds, and how Ennead VI 7 redefines the roles of Sameness and Otherness within Intellect’s life. Plotinus presents Intellect as self-same yet generating internal otherness through division, offering an ‘inverted’ interpretation of the Sophist’s interweaving (συμπλοκή) of kinds.

Plotinus’ interpretation of Plato’s Sophist centers on the “greatest kinds”: Being, Motion, Rest, Identity, and Difference. Within his metaphysics of Intellect and intelligible Being, these kinds play a privileged role in expressing the unity of subject and object characteristic of the second hypostasis. This chapter examines Plotinus’ exegesis of the greatest kinds in On the Genera of Being (Enneads VI 1–3), focusing especially on VI 2, where the Platonic kinds are established as intelligible genera. Yet the entire tripartite treatise may be read as an interpretation of the ontological section of the Sophist. The critiques of Aristotelian and Stoic categories in VI 1 develop Plato’s rejection of pluralists and monists, while the principle that Being is both one and many reflects Plato’s search for an ontology avoiding both extremes. Plotinus’ derivation of the genera from the life and thought of Intellect, and his view of them as structural moments of self-thinking activity, rests on the claim that ‘Being in the full sense’ must possess life and thought. This principle underlies both Plotinus’ reading of the Sophist and his broader interpretation of Platonic metaphysics.

This chapter explores Aquinas’s account of knowledge, first in creatures and then in God. Aquinas distinguishes between scientia (understanding) and cognitio (awareness), situating knowledge within the broader framework of living beings, sensation, and intellect. For him, knowledge entails the immaterial reception of form: animals possess cognition through sensation, while humans attain scientia by grasping natures universally and immaterially. Aquinas links knowledge with immateriality, arguing that intellect expands in proportion to freedom from matter. Turning to God, Aquinas contends that divine knowledge is identical with God’s essence, wholly immaterial, and thus unlimited. Unlike human discursive reasoning, God’s knowledge is simple, immediate, and comprehensive: God knows himself perfectly, and in knowing himself as Creator, knows all things, including non-existent and future contingent beings. The chapter concludes by examining Aquinas’s treatment of truth, omniscience, and divine causality, showing how God’s knowledge differs fundamentally from creaturely.

In this concluding chapter, I provide an outline of the Proclan system drawn exclusively from his personal works. I then proceed to compare it to the philosophical system found in Plato’s dialogues along with the testimony regarding it in the Platonic tradition. I examine the two systems under the rubrics: One, Intellect, and Soul. I conclude by arguing that, while Proclus has elevated theology to a place beyond that which Plato himself endorses, nevertheless Proclus emerges as a highly accurate and philosophically sophisticated exegete of Plato and that for the most part, Plato and Proclus stand or fall together philosophically. In the notional Triad: Plato, Platonism, and Proclus, the “middle term” does unite the two “extremes,” even if the logos of each of these is different.

Chapter 7 begins with Kornblith’s attempt to resurrect a teleology of the mind or intellect. I countenance his semantic, desire and pragmatic arguments, maintaining that none of them shows truth or true belief to be an objective good. By contrast, Aristotle’s idea that the intellect is constitutively directed at truth does show this (in virtue of the Aristotelian functionalist schema: i.e. all functions are correlated with perfections or goods). And Aristotle’s idea is corroborated not only by ‘folk’ and theoretical psychology, but also by cognitive science. For the latter is wedded to the notion that the brain is a cognitive system, functionally directed at cognition (viz. true belief). I go on to address three critiques of this intellectual teleology – those put forward by William James, evolutionary biology and global scepticism respectively – and argue that none of them is cogent. Next, I unpack two alternative accounts of the relation between truth and goodness – those of Ayer and Davidson – and maintain that they, too, fall short. Last, I tackle intellectual goods beyond true belief – such as knowledge and understanding – asking whether they or their objects form discernible hierarchies.

Chapter 1 begins by addressing how faith was central to Augustine’s theology, reading of Scripture, and Christian experience. Although Augustine understood faith as intellectual, this fit within his classical understanding of the human person. Moreover, though faith is intellectual, it is never without some motivating affection, is deeply interpersonal, and frequently has the sense of personal trust. Three early works ground and foreshadow his mature thinking on justification by faith. In de vera religione (True Religions), faith emerges as theological because it truly relates one to God through the incarnation; it is not merely pedagogical and instrumental, as in Neoplatonism. In de utilitate credendi (The Advantage of Believing), Augustine appeals to the necessity of faith in the case of students and friends to demonstrate how faith is virtuous. Lastly, de fide et symbolo (Faith and the Creed) shows how faith is fundamentally ecclesial through the inseparable relationship between the faith animating the believer and the faith received from the Church.

In Parts of Animals IV.10 Aristotle compares the human anatomy to the anatomy of other blooded, live-bearing animals with regard to their external, nonuniform parts. Of all these animals, Aristotle states, human beings alone have hands and arms instead of front-legs due to their erect posture. He associates the erect posture with human beings’ alleged divine nature, exhibited in their intellectual capacities. This poses two challenges that Aristotle addresses in the remainder of PA IV.10: first to show how most distinctive features of the human body (e.g. broad chests, fleshy buttocks, big feet, hands) can ultimately be traced back to the erect posture and second to account for the assumed connection between upright posture and intellectual capacities. Regarding the latter point the present chapter shows why, according to Aristotle, unimpaired thinking requires the upright posture and why the upright posture again requires a certain proportion between the upper and the lower bodily part.

Chapter 10 explores the range of love in Plotinus, going from human earthly (including sexual) loves up to the One/Good as itself love. Plotinus takes over Plato’s interest in love and makes it into a feature of reality in general. Human love – the desire to unite with the beloved, the feeling of need – anticipates aspects of higher levels of love, soul’s love which brings it to union with transcendent Intellect, Intellect being itself love of the One. I discuss the special sense in which the One can be said to be love and self-love.

The second chapter concerns the origin of motion in the universe. While Plato assumes a self-moving soul as origin, Aristotle posits an unmoved intellect. Proclus brings these two views together by regarding the unmoved intellect as ultimate source of motion and the self-moving soul as an intermediary entity. I demonstrate that his harmonisation effort goes beyond previous Platonist attempts due to the philosophical reasoning he provides. I also defend Proclus’ assumption of both unmoved intellect and self-moving soul as sources of motion against concerns brought up in scholarship.

The fourth chapter examines the problem of the causality of the unmoved mover. This issue is central in scholarship on Aristotle and goes back to late antiquity. I argue that here Proclus’ non-harmonist stance towards Aristotle emerges most strongly: not only did Aristotle fail to make the intellect an efficient cause of the cosmos’ being but his metaphysics generally is deficient, since he did not recognise the Platonic One as the highest principle. I contrast Proclus’ view with the position of Ammonius and Simplicius who see a complete agreement between Plato and Aristotle.

In this chapter, I examine Moses Maimonides’ conception of worship, concentrating on two questions: (1) On what grounds is a being worthy of worship? and (2) How is worship enacted? Concerning (1), I begin with Maimonides’ objects of false worship, aka idolatry, which are not only material but paradigmatically the intellects that were taken to be the ultimate causes of change in the world. Indeed thinking of God Himself as an intellect is the height of anthropomorphism and idolatry for Maimonides. Instead, the deity is worship-worthy as the unknowable necessarily existent being in virtue of itself on which the existence of everything else is causally dependent. Our attitude of radical contingency on this being is the ultimate grounds for His worship. Addressing (2), I argue that what enacts Maimonidean worship are not bodily acts but totally devoted, constant intellectual activities to achieve the humanly possible understanding of God and the natural world. Worship is not distinct from intellectual activity but a manner of engaging in it – worshippingly – and a way of life that embraces everything the worshipper does. Finally, I argue that idolatrous or false worship really consists in activities of the mind directed toward the wrong beings on which we are not contingent – and specifically ourselves and our own intellects.

This chapter recovers Schopenhauer’s previously neglected account of prudent political action. It points out the connections between the skilled governance of society and the savvy self-control of the individual in Schopenhauer’s works and argues that a full analysis of his conception of politics must include a treatment of prudence in world affairs as well as in interpersonal encounters. In fact, Schopenhauer supplemented his account of the modern state as an instrument of society-wide pacification with an account of prudent self-governance as an obligation for the modern subject. He believed that the state must impose constraints on disruptive egoism from the top, but that individuals should also prudently mask their egoism and in this way soften antagonisms. In Schopenhauer’s view, Hobbes’ theory of statehood could be constructively linked to Baltasar Gracián’s account of prudence; implemented together, they could strengthen the prospects of peace.

This chapter shows that the entire intelligible world in Plotinus has a personal nature. Every real being is a person, not an abstract concept or a dead thing. Moreover, those real beings don’t exist in separation, and they are not autonomous individuals, but form a unified, living whole, an organism or, as Plotinus calls it, a city with a soul. The Forms are sacred statues of the gods, which can be seen through their sensible images. In the end, Plotinus coins a neologism to describe this peculiar vision of reality: παμπρόσοωπόν τι, “being-all-faces”. This grand vision gives a deeper meaning to all the earlier metaphors of statues, reflected images, and faces that I have been elucidating in the book. In a deep unity of the intelligible world, to know and love one’s own face or to know and love the face of another is to contemplate all the other faces that participate in the living city that is reality.

This chapter discusses the way the contemplation of Intellect and the Forms is related to the experience of the sensible world. Despite the traditional view that Platonism espouses “two worlds”, Plotinus mocks the idea of the sensible and the intelligible as being actually two separated realms. Rather, for him there is only one world but seen from different perspectives by different cognitive activities of the soul. What happens in noetic contemplation is not that the Forms are seen apart from their sensible images, but that they are seen in and through their images, having become transparent to their essences. Or, when the experience is mature, it is rather that the sensible things are seen in and through their intelligible archetypes. To explain that phenomenon, Plotinus uses the continuum of dimness and clarity, and claims that perception is dim intellection, while intellection is clear perception. The contemplation of the transparency of the sensible to the intelligible gives rise to the experience of “bodies in Intellect” or the profound unity of the two realms, where the entire reality of the sensible is to be found in the intelligible.

Chapter 5 concludes the book with an analysis of the Maieutic section of the dialogue. It heralds a new beginning in the conversation, in which Socrates, having received at last Alcibiades’ full allegiance in question and answer, finally reveals to him his own being so as to secure commitment to a love that strives to grasp the totality of all that is, the highest expression of which is none other than the contemplative life. Self-knowing emerges as the zealous pursuit of the ultimate desideratum in the philosophical life, a striving that is akin to self-cultivation. Reason heals the soul, collecting it out of its opinionative and passionate dispersion, only to recognize, in the end, its synthetic activity is done in light of a higher grade of reality that transcends it, a reality in which it finally longs to participate; it yearns to become intellect.

Péter Lautner’s chapter ‘Concepts in the Neoplatonist Tradition’ expands the scope of the enquiry by discussing Platonist theories of concept formation in Late Antiquity. Generally speaking, the philosophers belonging to the so-called schools of Athens and Alexandria believe that the articulation of our rational capacity and the acquisition of knowledge somehow derives from the senses as well as the intellect, and they mostly agree that some elements of concept formation, notably generalisation, occur on the basis of sense-perception. They disagree, however, as to whether or not such generalisations are full-blown concepts. While all the philosophers under consideration endorse some version of the view that the main source of concepts is our intellect, which essentially contains fully fledged concepts, their accounts vary in respect of the intellect’s ability to project concepts onto the lower cognitive faculties. The problem of how the two kinds of concepts mentioned above are related to each other occupies the Platonists through the entire period under examination and constitutes the focus of Lautner’s analysis.