Education

Since 2019
Doctoral Candidate, RTG ‘Philosophy, Science and the Sciences’, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

2023
Graduate Research Trainee, McGill University, Montréal

2016 – 2019
M.A. Comparative Literature, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

2016 – 2017
Visiting Student, Trinity College Dublin

2015 – 2018
M.A. Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

2011 – 2015
B.A. Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Employment

2029 – 2023
Research Assistant, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

2017 – 2018
Graduate Assistant, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

2014 – 2016
Student Assistant, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Plotinus on the causality, simplicity and transcendence of the One

In my thesis I develop a new account of the nature and causality of Plotinus’ first principle, the One or Good. My main claim is that the One has to be understood primarily as its own self-creating activity. First, I focus on Plotinus’ general model of efficient causation, the so-called double energeia theory, and how he conceives of the One from its perspective. I defend the claim that the One has to be both a dunamis and an energeia in order to cause the eternal motion of intellect. It fulfils this role by being a paradigm for the sort of motion that it creates. I argue that this conception of the One is prompted by Plotinus’ reaction to Aristotle’s challenge of Platonic arkhai in the 11th aporia in Met. B, 4. Secondly, this causal understanding of the One poses prima facie a problem for Plotinus’ claim that the One is absolutely transcendent – a claim that includes the absence of all relations whatsoever, including causal ones. Thus, in order to address this worry, I argue that the One exercises its causal power only internally without turning, as it were, to what may come after it. An important part of my argument consists in showing that this reflexive causality of the One is compatible with its simplicity. Crucially, my argument involves developing a new account of what it means for Plotinus that something is a unity. I argue that this amounts to being a whole that relates to itself qua whole. In order to work as a paradigm of derivative unities, the One will, therefore, also need to be some kind of self-reflexive nature. Secondly, I argue that the One’s self-reflexivity has to be understood as a pure act of self-causation. The self-causation of the One will, then, work as a paradigm for the derivative self-reflexivity of posterior unities. My main basis for this view is Enn. VI 8, 14 – 21.