SOURCE: “Tradition and Personal Achievement in the Philosophy of Plotinus,” in Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 50, 1960, pp. 1-7.

In the following essay, originally presented as a lecture in 1959, Dodds outlines how Plotinus's ideas broke from Platonic doctrines.

I

The collected philosophical essays of Plotinus—to which we still unfortunately give the senseless and unplotinian title Enneads—constitute a nodal point in the evolution of Western ideas. In this book converage almost all the main currents of thought that come down from 800 years of Greek speculation; out of it there issues a new current, destined to fertilize minds as different as those of Augustine and Boethius, Dante and Meister Eckhart, Coleridge, Bergson, and Mr. T. S. Eliot. And the historian cannot but ask himself what is the secret of this transmutation by which the old is taken up in the new and given a fresh direction and significance. Such...