Plótinosz az önismeretről

Plotinus on Thinking Oneself and the First Person

In a few places Plotinus makes curious remarks about the self-thinking of Intellect, the second hypostasis. He suggests—or so I shall argue in the paper—that this self-thinking is essentially thought in the first person and amounts to a kind of conscious self-identification. I shall present and analyse three such passages. Given this account, it turns out that we find in Plotinus a stronger and richer notion of self-thinking and self-knowledge than any previous philosopher has offered. This notion, though in no way current, is for obvious reasons of considerable philosophical interest.

Professor Emilsson has widely worked on ancient philosophy, especially on the Platonic tradition. He has authored three seminal monographs on Plotinus: Plotinus on Sense-Perception (Cambridge UP, 1988), Plotinus On Intellect (Oxford UP, 2007) and a comprehensive account of Plotinus' philosophy in the Routledge Philosophers series (Plotinus. Routledge, 2017). He has translated into English and commented on Plotinus' treatise On the Presence of Being, One and the Same, Everywhere as a Whole (together with Steven K. Strange, Parmenides Publishing, 2014), and several Platonic dialogues into Icelandic. He has published many articles on a wide range of topics in ancient metaphysics and ethics, and on their reception in modern times.