Materie

Plotinus’s doctrine of matter is not easily explained, all the more since Plotinus operates with a double notion of matter and even puts forward a theory of two matters in order to explicate the metaphysical process originating from the One. This chapter takes on the difficulty of how to elucidate this notion of matter and its questionable ontological status, and provides a survey of the contemporary theories that try to disentangle the problems that Plotinus’s wording poses: is matter to be identified with evil? What is matter’s relation to privation? Did Plotinus’s tenets gradually change and eventually end in a quasi-gnostic adverseness towards matter?