ABSTRACT
Plotinus is instead worried by the astrologers’ causal accounts of why their predictions are accurate. He seems to have been better informed about the accounts than other ancient critics of astrology. Plotinus is critical of astrologers not so much for their predictive claims as for the causal theory that underlies those claims. He undermines the causal theory by saying that some things are not brought about by physical causes at all, but are rather ‘ours’. Plotinus adds that even things that are brought about physically have a multiplicity of physical causes, so that any reference to the stars could provide only a partial explanation. Plotinus, then, can take from the Timaeus passage a message similar to the one he finds in the Myth of Er. Both passages subject human life to a necessity which is associated with bodily existence and which comes to us from the heavens.
