Plotino Pitagorico

Note sulla polemica plotiniana contro l'analogia dei pitagorici

Abstract

Pythagorean Plotinus: Notes on Plotinus’ polemic against the Pythagorean analogy

In Enneads VI, 6, Numeri, Plotinus articulates a complex discourse on part of Plato’s so-called unwritten doctrines, in which one of the most fascinating aspects is the search
for a well-founded categorisation of the eidetic number. His effort leads him to develop a particular threefold categorisation of numbers, whose essentiality is necessarily transported beyond the experiential. The distinction between counting numbers and counted numbers is certainly not a Plotinian invention, but can already be found in Aristotle, discussed in several places in Metaphysics, where Plato is credited with the distinction between eidetic numbers and monadic numbers, i.e. numbers composed of quantitative units, and again in Physics, in a brief note on the duality of numbers, distinguished as “counted numbers” and “numbers with which one counts”. This distinction, certainly Platonic, is in all likelihood attributable to the Pythagoreans, who already in the 5th century seem to have developed a sophisticated theory of numbers, centred on the fundamental categories of ἄπειρον and πέρας.