Frederic M. Schroeder

Thinking on Thinking

Philosophy

“Berchman’s able account of self-awareness in Western philosophy combines his broad command of philology, intellectual history, and philosophical reflection. Since Descartes, the human intellect is detached from its objects in an epistemological distinction between subject and object. Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus properly locate self-awareness in a larger field in which self-awareness embraces the perception of things included in that embrace. Plotinus offers us an aesthetic that may heal the fractured self.”