Quiz: Plotinus

When was Plotinus born?

• About 204, probably Lycopolis, Egypt.
• About 310 BC, in the state of Zhao, China.
• About 360 BC, Elis, Greece.
• 341 BC, Samos, Greece.

When did Plotinus die?

• 270, in Campania, Italy.
• About 391 BC.
• About 450 BC.
• About 135, Nicopolis, Greece.

What is Plotinus known for?

• The doctrine of the One, from which Intellect and Soul overflow, and the soul's return by contemplation.
• The butterfly dream: did he dream he was a butterfly, or is a butterfly dreaming it is him. And the useless tree that survives because no carpenter wants it.
• The division of things into what is up to us and what is not, the core of his handbook Enchiridion.
• The claim that human nature is bad, that ritual reshapes it, and that Heaven is just nature running its course.

Which school of thought was Plotinus part of?

• Neoplatonism, built from Plato with Stoic and Aristotelian parts.
• Sophist, a traveling teacher of rhetoric and argument.
• Confucianism, its realist wing.
• Pyrrhonism, the first skeptical school.

True or false: Founder of Neoplatonism, born probably at Lycopolis in Egypt, who taught at Rome from 244 until his death.

• True
• False