Realism in Rough Water

Abstract

Plotinus is a notoriously difficult philosopher whose eclectic and elliptical style generates numerous problems for the interpreter. Intent upon establishing the consistency and uniqueness of Plotinus' views about sense perception, the young Icelandic scholar Ey6lfur Emilsson boldly sets sail on this rough sea. 1 Directing our attention to specific texts where perception is discussed, he considers these passages in detail and examines them within the context provided by earlier Greek philosophy. This approach forces the reader to reflect on Plotinus' contributions to the philosophy of perception and to see that philosophy in a new light. Emilsson argues that Plotinus is a direct realist whose theory, nevertheless, embraces a distinction between sensory affections and perceptions. After introducing several central doctrines of Plotinus' metaphysics and psychology in the first two chapters, Emilsson turns to the topic of sensory affection in the third and fourth chapters. Examining Enneads IV.5.1-4,8, Emilsson, contrary to other interpreters, argues that Plotinus discusses a medium in vision, light, only to reject it as the vehicle for visual transmission. The organ is affected not by the medium but through sympatheia between the object and the eye due to the nonphysical omnipresence of in the medium (p. 57). In the fourth chapter, Emilsson develops the notion of sensory affection as an assimilation of the organ to the object and he argues that this assimilation is not merely a physical change in the organ. In vision, the organ is assimilated to the form (color) which possesses extensionality and spatiality but not mass and so is intermediate between the sensible and the intelligible. The next three chapters deal with perception. Here Emilsson broaches a number of important topics including the unity of perception, the relation between perception and the faculty of representation, perception as a form