St Augustine: Philosophy in an Hour

Plotinus had been born in Alexandria at the beginning of the third century A.D. Like many brilliant critics, he thought he understood what he had read better than the author himself. In this case Plotinus was convinced that he understood the philosophy of Plato much better than Plato himself had managed. In his attempt to explain what Plato had really meant to say, Plotinus transformed Plato’s original theories into what came to be called Neoplatonism. Into the container of Platonic theory Plotinus poured a cocktail of features from Pythagoras, Aristotle, and the Stoics, adding a mystical twist of his own.