The Enneads

This edition includes:
• New English translation in a modernized edition
• Critical introduction

Everything that exists flows from a single source, and the deepest human task is to find the way back to it. That is the vision Plotinus taught, and it has never stopped working on the minds of those who meet it.

The Enneads gathers his fifty-four treatises, arranged by his student Porphyry into six groups of nine. Here are writings on beauty and how it draws the soul upward, on virtue and happiness, on the nature of the soul and its longing, on eternity, time, providence, free will and memory, and on the One that lies beyond being and beyond thought. Plotinus argues with the Gnostics, questions Plato himself, and describes the ascent not as a flight from the world but as learning to see it truly. Porphyry's Life of Plotinus opens the volume and carries you into the school itself: the students, the arguments, the teacher who refused to sit for a portrait and whose presence alone, his biographer says, could hold a room.

This edition presents Plotinus in the language of today: his text rewritten for readers who come to it now, free in form and faithful in substance, so that nothing of his matter is lost along the way. A critical introduction opens the volume, ahead of the treatises, to give you your bearings before the climb begins.

If you want philosophy that asks for your full attention and repays it, this is a book to keep close, to read slowly and return to often. Add it to your library.