Typically, Aristotle’s notion of an accidental unity is explained using our concept of identity, but doing so is fraught and liable to mislead. I argue that we should explain accidental unities in terms of sameness: Doing so not only shows a coherence among texts thought to be in tension with one another, it reconciles the two competing conceptions of accidental unities in a satisfying way. I conclude by answering several Boolean questions that naturally arise in response to the inclusion of accidental unities in Aristotle’s ontology.

I show that a consequence of Lear’s canonical analysis of ’qua’ is that the doctor’s causing a house qua housebuilder entails that the doctor is a cause of a house, but this fact is incompatible with Aristotle’s own thought. I proceed in two stages. First, I give Lear’s analysis and show that it has the consequence I say it has by applying the analysis to a passage from Physics 1.8. Second, I consider what follows from this passage on the basis of Aristotle’s account of causing as such and its connection to causing simply. I argue that, on Aristotle’s considered view, failing to cause simply is simply failing to cause. And it is because of this that he denies precisely what Lear attributes to him. The resulting picture shows that, in all likelihood, there is no analysis of Aristotle’s use of ‘qua’. This is so because the relation between F and G, when something is F qua G, is not one that can be captured in the language of necessary and sufficient conditions with modals. For Aristotle, being F qua G does not entail, as Lear would have it, that Gs are necessarily Fs; rather, it entails that Gs are naturally Fs.

I consider two claims about the texture of Aristotle’s natural world: first, that substances have indefinitely many accidents; second, that effects have indefinitely many accidental causes. Aristotle takes the first claim to explain the second, but the conceptual connections between them are not obvious. I show all that is required to connect one to the other, and in doing so work out the logic of accidental causation.

I begin by outlining the ontology of lucky occurrences. Based on the conditions that Aristotle sets on such occurrences, we see that their ontology is populated by accidental unities. Next, I argue that, based on the findings of earlier chapters, Aristotle takes lucky occurrences to be uncaused. I then consider what is sometimes taken to be evidence that lucky occurrences are, in fact, caused. I argue that, in each case, Aristotle’s claims only amount to its being as if something caused a lucky occurrence, which is consistent with there being no cause of such occurrences. I conclude by discussing the ramifications of this account for Aristotle’s physics. Though there is more to accidental causation than luck, the fact that lucky occurrences are uncaused entails that there are more varieties of accidental causation than is normally thought. Ultimately, the case of luck suggests that the standard model of accidental causation is to be expanded: Rather than analyzing accidental causation in terms of causation and accidentality, we should analyze it in terms of causation and sameness.

I show that both Aristotle’s ontology and his theory of causation are ordered hierarchies: Both entities and causes are divided into different groups, and those groups are ordered according to their relevant priority. I explain how the facts about these kinds of priorities fit together, arguing that certain accidental beings are causally prior without anything being causally prior to them. I conclude with an account of the resulting ontology and etiology. It turns out that the role of the accidental in Aristotle’s natural philosophy is orthogonal to its role in his ontology. The accidental stands to doing as the substantial stands to being.

Lloyd Gerson wrote in his 1994 monograph on Plotinus: “The elements of Plotinus’ thought that can usefully be labeled ‘mystical’ are rather easily isolated from his other epistemological doctrines.” Whether that is true depends heavily on how we understand “mystical”. In any case, Gerson proposes to reconstruct a firmly third-person, objective view of Plotinus’ philosophy. This book is an attempt at something quite different, namely, to see not only Plotinus’ epistemological doctrines but also his metaphysical doctrines as impossible to isolate from the “mystical” or “contemplative”, or, as I have argued here, the first-person, subjective dimension of his philosophy. As a result of such a reconstruction, Plotinus’ philosophy as a whole is contemplative. Everything in it contemplates and everything is contemplation.

This chapter discusses the creation of the intelligible world, which comes to being through the formative activity of the Good on its first product. The Great Kinds are dynamically balanced principles, by virtue of which Intelligible Matter received form as Being, Movement achieves Rest, and Difference is united by Identity, thus establishing Intellect, the One-Many. The three crucial principles of the Plotinian metaphysics are outlined: (1) the principle of the microcosm, (2) the imaging principle, and (3) the principle of the triadic selfhood. In light of the first principle, at all the levels of reality there exist individual beings who exist within and are united with the great principles of reality by virtue of two forms of participation. The notions of vertical and horizontal participation are defined. The imaging principle relates to reality consisting of hierarchies of dynamically produced images of higher archetypes. What is expressed participates vertically in its archetype. The third principle is a triadic intertwining of loving and knowing with selfhood. The “negative” or “potential” aspects of the Great Kinds are described as the metaphysical seeds of evil and fall.

This chapter discusses the famous Plotinian image of the transparent, luminous sphere, appearing in several versions in different treatises. Psychic contemplation is divided into two levels: imaginative and dianoetic. The first corresponds with the level of Nature by virtue of our higher imagination, while the second one corresponds with the level of the World Soul by virtue of our reason. At the imaginative level, we overcome the sense that we are located in our head and experience a sort of the expansion of our self, in which we feel ourselves permeating the whole of the sensible world. At the dianoetic level, we find ourselves to be present everywhere in a completely non-localised and non-extended way. Our reason becomes the transparent sphere in which we see all the sensible world, but this doesn’t mean that we use discursive thinking or that we analyse the world. Reason is an intuitive, “transparent eyeball”, in which we see everything as united and through which we see the sensible qualities in their archetypes, the higher logoi in the World Soul. It is freedom from anything spatial, temporal, and sensible. The world is seen as existing in ourselves, but we are not the world.

This chapter shows that the entire intelligible world in Plotinus has a personal nature. Every real being is a person, not an abstract concept or a dead thing. Moreover, those real beings don’t exist in separation, and they are not autonomous individuals, but form a unified, living whole, an organism or, as Plotinus calls it, a city with a soul. The Forms are sacred statues of the gods, which can be seen through their sensible images. In the end, Plotinus coins a neologism to describe this peculiar vision of reality: παμπρόσοωπόν τι, “being-all-faces”. This grand vision gives a deeper meaning to all the earlier metaphors of statues, reflected images, and faces that I have been elucidating in the book. In a deep unity of the intelligible world, to know and love one’s own face or to know and love the face of another is to contemplate all the other faces that participate in the living city that is reality.

This chapter discusses psychic contemplation as our participation in the contemplation of the World Soul, who creates the sensible world and time. As a result, we see the world as becoming alive and we transcend time by finding in ourselves the peace and rest of Nature, the lower power of the World Soul. The main faculty in ourselves which participates in Nature is imagination (and memory), although Nature herself doesn’t entertain perception, imagination, or memory. When we ascend to this level, we begin to live in the present, mindfully awake to our sensible experience, but also having a sense that we are something different from it. Sensible experience no longer deceives us because we see the sensible world in and through its archetypes, which are the logoi in Nature. Like a geometer who sees the intelligible structure of the square in squared sensible shapes, we intuitively see the essence of things (“what it is”) revealed to us through their qualities (“what it is like”).

This chapter discusses noetic contemplation proper, that is, seeing Intellect as he sees himself by virtue of our vertical participation. We see the entire intelligible world, consisting of the Forms, and we see the unfolding of the Great Kinds, the highest of the Forms in it. Our contemplation of Intellect has an unfolding character, although this doesn’t mean that we see Intellect as being in time. Plotinus shows the limitations of our individual perspective on this and other cosmic principles in contemplation. We see both the unity and the multiplicity of Intellect but in a way that transcends dialectical, discursive, and conceptual thinking. Contemplation doesn’t abolish our ability to think discursively but rather enriches that ability. Dialectical search for the truth is harmonised with a direct, intuitive vision of Intellect. On the one hand, the vision is expressed through dialectic and, on the other, dialectic leads us to and strengthens our intuitive, noetic experience of reality. Philosophy and contemplation become two sides of the same life.

This chapter discusses the way the contemplation of Intellect and the Forms is related to the experience of the sensible world. Despite the traditional view that Platonism espouses “two worlds”, Plotinus mocks the idea of the sensible and the intelligible as being actually two separated realms. Rather, for him there is only one world but seen from different perspectives by different cognitive activities of the soul. What happens in noetic contemplation is not that the Forms are seen apart from their sensible images, but that they are seen in and through their images, having become transparent to their essences. Or, when the experience is mature, it is rather that the sensible things are seen in and through their intelligible archetypes. To explain that phenomenon, Plotinus uses the continuum of dimness and clarity, and claims that perception is dim intellection, while intellection is clear perception. The contemplation of the transparency of the sensible to the intelligible gives rise to the experience of “bodies in Intellect” or the profound unity of the two realms, where the entire reality of the sensible is to be found in the intelligible.