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Porphyry

image from Porphyry Malchus
(MacTutor History of Mathematics archive)

Porphyry (c.232/4-c.305) or Porphyrios was born in Tyre [now Lebanon] or Batanaea [now Syria], and studied in Athens, before joining the Neoplatonic group of Plotinus in Rome. In 263-268 or thereabouts, Porphyry studied philosophy in Rome under Plotinus, who rescued him from a suicidal depression [2].

In 301 Porphyry completed The Enneads, a systematized and edited collection of the works of Plotinus, including a short but very informative biography. The name Enneads means "Nines", so-called because they were sorted into chapters of nine sections each. (This arrangement of course was purely Porphyry's idea). The Enneads became a book of great significance and influence, not only in the Hellenistic-Roman world, but later in the Islamic and Renaissance Christian worlds as well.

Although not an original thinker in the league of his teacher Plotinus, or his student Iamblichus, Porphyry nevertheless was possessed of great learning, an interest in and great talent for historical and philological criticism, and an ernest desire to uproot false teachings in order to ennoble people and turn them to the Good. He declared the salvation of the soul as the ultimate purpose of philosophy.

Even more than Plotinus, Porphyry emphasised the mystic path of "flight from the body" (although never in teh context of the Gnostics who considered the material world as "evil"). He also played down the emanationist hierarchies of the Middle Platonists and Plotinus, and seemed sometimes to combine One and Intellect, a process of "telescoping the hypostases" taken even further by an anonymous student and commentator on Plato's Parmenides. Yet at the same time he represented the beginnings of the later Neoplatonic tendency of organising reality in both vertical and "horizontal" triads; this became a very important element in later Neoplatonic metaphysics. For Porphyry, Being, Life, and Intellect were phases in the eternal self-determination of the ultimate reality. (compare the Kashmir Shaivite "Pure Tattwas" and Sri Aurobindo's "Upper Hemisphere" or "Supreme Nature" (Paraprakriti), regarding the manifestation of the Absolute)

Among his many philosophical works were

Against the Christians, a work of 15 volumes directed not against Christ or his teachings, but against the Christians of his own day and their sacred books, which, he argued, were the work of ignorant people and deceivers, and whose doctrines he attacked on both philosophical and exegetical grounds. Although as to be expected banned in 448 and ordered destroyed, copious extracts remain in the writings of Augustine and others [1].
Aids to the Study of the Intelligibles, a basic summary of Neoplatonism.
Introduction to Categories is a commentary on Aristotle's Categories, describing how qualities attributed to things may be classified. Perhaps Porphyry's most influential contribution to philosophy, it incorporated Aristotle's logic into Neoplatonism, in particular the doctrine of the categories interepreted in terms of entities (in later philosophy, "universal"). Boethius' Isagoge was a Latin translation of the introduction, and became a standard medieval textbook, which set the stage for medieval philosphical-theological developments of logic and the problem of universals. In medieval textbooks, the "Porphyrian Tree" illustrates his logical classification of substance. [2]
Letter to Marcella, a discourse on the spiritual path, written to his wife
On Abstinence, an argument in favour of vegetarianism.
and a number of other works, including many since lost.