Abstract

Something about the Western mind loves a dichotomy. Descartes’s distinction between res cogitans and res extensa shaped natural science and modern analytical philosophy. The existentialists could not escape this inclination, either. Sartre dichotomized the world, beginning his philosophical inquiry by distinguishing being from nothingness, the in-itself from the for-itself. It is, ultimately, the consequences of the Cartesian wounding of both thought and self that Erik Craig recognizes in his penetrating essay. He argues persuasively that, in working therapeutically with patients, we need to go beyond the description of a pathological ontic state to its ontological structure. This..