Bibliographic record
Abstract
I put forward a unified account of Plotinus’ theory of matter with a focus on why it is necessary to explain how things exist at each level of his metaphysics. I argue that matter is a quasi-principle, insofar as it is a necessary condition for the generation of all products of the One, the first principle. It is not a principle on a par with the One, however, because matter is itself generated by the One. It is also not on a par with the One because matter, as non-being, does not make a causal contribution to the generation of all existents. I arrive at this conclusion by investigating what Plotinus says about the role that matter plays in the generation of the sensible realm. The existents in the sensible realm are bodies, which are composed of qualities and extended in three dimensions. I argue that Plotinus thinks bodies can only exist if there is a matter that exists to receive all these qualities, while nonetheless never joining with any of them. The bodies in the sensible realm also undergo change by losing and gaining the qualities. I claim that Plotinus explains this by rejecting the Aristotelian idea that matter becomes a numerical unity with the forms it receives. I also explain how matter can be understood as responsible for the existence of evil in bodies and souls, despite its lack of causal influence. The evils that exist in the sensible realm are a necessary result of the proliferation of goodness, which matter makes possible by providing a space for the higher principles to produce in. I also examine what Plotinus says about matter as it exists in the intelligible realm, where the Intellect and the intelligible Beings reside. I show that previous assumptions about the nature of this matter are wrong and that we must presuppose that the same matter exists among the intelligibles as exists among the bodies of the sensible realm. I then explain how matter – both sensible and intelligible, since they are the same – is generated directly from the One as a place for its product.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".