Plotinus

Plotinus was born around 204 AD in Roman Egypt and studied under Ammonius Saccas, a self-taught philosopher working in the Platonic tradition. In his metaphysical writings he laid out three fundamental principles that became the scaffold of what 19th-century historians would later call Neoplatonism. The system moved through late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, pulling in pagan, Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, and early Islamic thinkers who found in his work — especially his treatment of the duality of the One — a language for the structure of existence. He died in 270 AD, leaving…