SSP1 - CHAPTER1.pptx

CHAPTER 1: WHO AM I? A PHILOSOPHICAL JOURNEY TO DISCOVERING THE SELF  1. SOCRATES: KNOW THYSELF “An unexamined life is a life not worth living”.  Examine one’s life, for it is in the examination that we can know ourselves”. There was soul fi rst before man’s body....

CHAPTER 1: WHO AM I? A PHILOSOPHICAL JOURNEY TO DISCOVERING THE SELF  1. SOCRATES: KNOW THYSELF “An unexamined life is a life not worth living”.  Examine one’s life, for it is in the examination that we can know ourselves”. There was soul fi rst before man’s body. Man’s existence was fi rst in the realm of ideas and exists as a soul or pure mind.  This soul has knowledge by direct intuition and all these are stored in his mind. SOCRATIC METHOD – is an exchange of question and answer that ultimately aims to make the person remember all the knowledge that he has forgotten, including his former omniscient self. 2. PLATO The dichotomy of the: 1. IDEAL WORLD or the WORLD OF FORMS – is the permanent, unchanging reality 2. MATERIAL WORLD - a world that keeps on changing; it is what we see around us; this is where we live; the replica of the real world found in the HUMAN BEINGS are composed of 2 things: 1. Body – changing; not the real self but only a replica of our true Self. 2. Soul – is the true self - the permanent, unchanging Self The soul exists before birth and leaves room for the possibility that it might survive bodily death. The body is seen as some sort of prison.  We can free ourselves from the imprisonment of our bodily senses through contemplation.  CONTEMPL ATION – communion of the mind with universal and eternal ideas  We continue to exist even in the absence of our bodies because we are Souls only.  3. AUGUSTINE “But my sin was this – that I looked for pleasure, beauty and truth and not in Him but in myself and His other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion and error.” In his younger years, he abandoned his early Christian faith because he found it diffi cult to reconcile a loving, all-knowing and all- powerful God with the evils in the world. Taking his cue from the two worlds of Plato, he now diff erentiated what is the real world and the temporary world. Our world (world of materials) – is not our fi nal home but a just a temporary home where we are just passing through Our real world is found in the world where there is permanence and infi nity – that’s the world where God is. Moral law exists and is imposed on the mind; reason makes us recognize these laws, and thus, we can discern the distinction between right and wrong. Only God is fully real – as the unchanging, permanent being and he sees God as the ultimate expression of love. God, out of love, created MAN. Man in fact, is created in the image of God.  He has an immortal souls whose main pursuit is to have an everlasting life with god  In this world, man pursues happiness , but this can only be There is an eternal law – which should be universally followed – coming from the Eternal Reason or God himself. ETERNAL LAW – the law of conscience and this conscience is that small still voice that tells us instinctively whether our actions are morally good or bad.  4.RENE DESCARTES Father of Modern Philosophy; brilliant mathematician “I think, therefore, I am”.  His essence lay in being a purely thinking being, because even if he can doubt whether he has real body or it’s just a trick of his senses, one thing he cannot doubt is that he is thinking. Mind and body are separate and very distinct from one another. But the mind is conjoined with the body in an intimate way – they causally act upon each other. The essence of the Self (as a thinking being) – the self being the Mind more than the body When the body is gone,  5. JOHN LOCKE He is a great British empiricist philosopher and is widely credit for laying the foundation of human rights and commitment to the idea that the sovereign should be the people and not the monarch. The concept of a The memory theory – holds that we were in the past person’s memory in for as long as we can the defi nition of the remember something from self. the past. The memory renders Personality identity is explained in terms of us self-conscious we psychological connection are that one and the between life stages in the same person. memory theory  6. DAVID HUME An empiricist – regarded the senses as our key source of knowledge. The existence of the mind is divided into two:  1. IMPRESSION  2. IDEAS IMPRESSIONS The self is nothing over  Based on sensory and above the stream experience of perceptions we IDEAS enjoy.  Things we create in There is no permanent our minds even though and unchanging self. we are no longer A person is a bundle of experiencing them. perception.  “I” will be constantly changing because the different experiences one has for every constant change will affect and reshape that person.  7. SIGMUND FREUD Father of Psychoanalysis He devised a structure and the infl uence of his socio-cultural environment.  TRIPARTITE DIVISION OF MIND ID – represents man’s biological nature, the impulses and the bodily desires. EGO – reality principle; it reduces the confl ict between id and superego by implementing defense mechanism SUPEREGO – represents the ethical component of the personality and provides the moral standards by which the ego operates.  8. GILBERT RYLE “Minds are things, but diff erent sorts of things from bodies”. A talk about the mind is simply a talk about behavior. The mind is not distinct from the body. The only way by which we can know the mind is working is through the behavior of the person, hence we can only know a person through how a man behaves, their tendencies and reactions in certain circumstances.  9. PAUL CHURCHLAND He believes that the “self” is the brain. “We do have an organ for understanding and recognizing moral facts. It is called the brain”. The term mind – our moods, emotions, actions, consciousness are deeply aff ected by the state of our brain. By manipulating certain parts of our brain, our feelings, actions and physical state are successfully altered.  10. MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY “ We know not through our intellect but through our experience”. A person is defi ned by virtue of movement and expression. “I am the sum of all that I make my body do”. THIS INCLUDES THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PAST AND HOW I ACTUALLY MAKE DECISIONS IN THE