Plotinus, or The Simplicity of Vision

Pierre Hadot's Plotinus, Or the Simplicity of Vision, translated by Michael Chase and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1993, is a scholarly study of the third century Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus by one of the twentieth century's leading historians of ancient philosophy, examining the philosophical ascent toward what Plotinus called the One and the rare unitive mystical state Plotinus's student Porphyry records his teacher as having reached. Hadot's study is independent of, though it complements, any translation of Plotinus's own writing, the Enneads, which stands as its own separate primary source. Its strength is Hadot's standing as a major interpreter of ancient philosophy read as a lived practice rather than only abstract doctrine. Its limit is that Hadot's reading of Plotinus as fundamentally about lived spiritual exercise is itself one influential interpretive approach among others in Plotinus scholarship, not the only way specialists read him.