Plotinus: The Enneads

This is Stephen MacKenna's English translation of Plotinus's Enneads, the foundational text of Neoplatonist philosophy, published in this Penguin Classics edition with an introduction and revisions by the classicist John Dillon. As a primary philosophical source in careful translation, it is the strongest possible evidence for what Plotinus himself actually argued about the One, the soul and the nature of reality, with Dillon's scholarly apparatus helping situate the notoriously difficult text for readers. Its limit is that MacKenna's translation, though long admired for its literary quality, dates from the earlier twentieth century, and specialists note it sometimes favors readability over the most literal philosophical precision, so a technically disputed passage is best checked against a more recent academic translation as well.