THE PHILOSOPHER'S ZONE: "Who was Plotinus?" June 11, 2011.

He believed in the One, a fundamental principle of the universe. He believed in the Intellect and the Soul. He also thought that matter was evil. This week, the Philosopher's Zone enters the strange world of Plotinus, a great philosopher who kept the pagan flame alight at a time when the Roman empire was about to give itself up to Christianity.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2011/3237626.htm

Wilberding, James. Review of Pauliina Remes' PLOTINUS ON SELF. NDPR (May 2009).

Remes, Pauliina. Plotinus on Self: the Philosophy of the 'We'. Cambridge: CUP, 2007.

One's 'self,' like one's 'true love,' might seem prima facie to be the kind of term whose very meaning demands its own uniqueness. Of course we can speak of someone having 'another (and another) true love,' but we can't do so without diminishing the sense of the phrase. Used often enough one might suspect that it refers to nothing more than someone whom one really likes or desires. So what are we to make of someone like Plotinus who suggests that each one of us has two selves -- an embodied self and an immaterial self? This is the question that Remes sets out to tackle in her recent book, in which she aims to demonstrate that Plotinus does have a coherent and unified conception of the self that has an important role to play in his metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. This is a rich book that discusses far more than could be covered in a single review, and in what follows I shall focus on what I take to be some of its central theses on the unity of selfhood. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16265.

Stamatellos, Giannis. Review of Pauliina Remes' PLOTINUS ON SELF. BMCR January 6, 2009.

Remes, Pauliina. Plotinus on Self: the Philosophy of the 'We'. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. During the last thirty years of scholarship considerable attention has been paid to Plotinus' theory of the self. The first complete monograph derives from G. O. Daly's influential study Plotinus' Philosophy of the Self (published in 1973) and, so far, a considerable number of studies have been published on Plotinus' conception of selfhood, with more recently the work of Richard Sorabji Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life and Death (Oxford, 2006). Remes' book aims to offer a new, complete and multi-angled study on Plotinus' philosophy of the self 'not just for students and scholars of Neoplatonism but also for readers interested in self and/or ancient philosophy in general, but who may be unacquainted with the subtleties of the heavy metaphysics of Plotinus' (p. 18). Ancient philosophers constantly declared the importance of self-knowledge and self-reflection. From the Presocratic and the Socratic exhortation to 'know yourself', to the Stoic psychology of the self, the concept of selfhood underlies not only the self-reflective nature of psyche but also the perceptible and cognitive relation of ourselves to the others. Plotinus develops the concept of selfhood in different philosophical matters. Initially he notably prefers the plural 'we' in place of a singular 'I' and poses, as Remes correctly states (p. 9), the central philosophical aporia: 'Who are we?' (Ennead VI.4.14.16). This question highlights the distinction between the terms 'person' and 'self'; whereas 'person' is a term related to the body, preferences and responsibilities, the term 'self' is more directly related to human soul. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/01/20090106.html.