Western Philosophy PDF

Part 1 THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PERSPECTIVES Introduction ❖ Understanding the nature of the self is the primary concern throughout history. ❖ Understanding the nature of the self is not simple – it takes time and effort. ❖ Understanding the self is most definitely one of the essence of...

Part 1 THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PERSPECTIVES Introduction ❖ Understanding the nature of the self is the primary concern throughout history. ❖ Understanding the nature of the self is not simple – it takes time and effort. ❖ Understanding the self is most definitely one of the essence of what it means to be a human. Introduction ❖ Philosophers question the nature and existence of the self. ❖ Sociologists claim that the individual self is the social self, that is, the self-image is the social-image. ❖ Anthropologists assert the inseparability of self and culture. ❖ Psychologists maintain that the self is our personality— the changing perception of personal identity.  Chapter 1 THE PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE OF THE SELF PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES What is Philosophy? Greek words : Philos and Sophia Meaning : Love for wisdom Study of acquiring knowledge through rational thinking and inquiries that involve in answering questions regarding the nature and existence of man and the world we live in  Introduction ❖ Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle first set the framework for understanding the self in Western thought. ❖ Despite the philosophers’ disagreements among themselves about their views of the self, they all agree that Self-knowledge is a prerequisite for a happy and meaningful life.  Socrates: The Self is an Immortal Soul ❖ The self is the soul. The self is not the body. ❖ Every human being possesses an immortal soul that survived the physical body. ❖ The soul as an immortal entity longs for wisdom and perfection. ❖ The physical body limits and hinders the soul’s pursuit of wisdom and perfection. Socrates: The Self is an Immortal Soul An unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates: The Self is an Immortal Soul ❖ The individual person can have a meaningful and happy life only if he becomes virtuous and knows the value of himself. ❖ INTROSPECTION, the Socratic method of self-examination where one weighs out one’s thoughts, feelings, desires, and activities— making sure that they are not whimsical but rational, not fleeting but lasting. ❖ Examine – from the Latin word ‘examen’ – test or process of weighing Plato: The True Self is the Rational Soul ❖ The self is synonymous with the soul. ❖ Living is a process of SELF-PURIFICATION, cleansing the soul from the imperfections of passionate and physical existence. ❖ According to him a person who is a follower of truth and wisdom will not be tempted by vices and will always be correct/moral/ethical  3 parts of the soul Appetitive Soul – the part of the person that is driven by desire and need to satisfy oneself. This satisfaction involves physical needs and pleasures and desires, objects and situations Spirited Soul – courageous part of a person, one who wants to do something or to right the wrongs that they observe. This is very competitive and is very active. Rational Soul – the drive of our lives, the part that thinks and plan for the future (the conscious mind). It decides what to do, when to do it and the possible results one could have depending on their action. Plato: The True Self is the Rational Soul ❖ REASON is the divine essence that seeks wisdom and understanding. ❖ SPIRIT is responsible for self-preservation and includes the emotions of love, anger, ambition, aggressiveness, and empathy. ❖ APPETITE is responsible for basic biological drives: hunger, thirst, and sexual desire. Plato: The True Self is the Rational Soul ❖ Genuine happiness is achieved when there is justice. ❖ Justice reigns in the person when there is inner harmony. ❖ JUSTICE/INNER HARMONY: When each part of the self performs the function due to it and is not encroaching on another: reason cultivating wisdom, spirit cultivating courage, and appetite cultivating temperance. Aristotle: The Soul is the Essence of the Self ❖ The human being is the unity of body and soul. ❖ Body and soul are inseparable entities: the soul being the form of the body. ❖ All living beings have souls. ❖ The soul is the principle of life and action.  Aristotle: The Soul is the Essence of the Self ❖ There are three kinds of souls pertaining to three kinds of living beings. 1. VEGETATIVE SOUL – principle of life possessed by plants. It functions for growth and nutrition. 2. SENTIENT SOUL – principle of life possessed by animals. It is responsible for mobility, sensation, feeling, and emotion. 3. RATIONAL SOUL – principle of life possessed by humans. It is responsible for understanding, thinking, and reasoning.  Aristotle: The Soul is the Essence of the Self ❖ As the most complex of living beings, man possesses the three souls. Aristotle: The Soul is the Essence of the Self ❖ But what defines the human being is its RATIONAL SOUL. ❖ All souls have their own specific end or purpose and seeking for their own ACTUALIZATION. ❖ The happiness of souls consists in the actualization of their own specific potentials. ❖ As a rational being, the happiness of man consists in the actualization of the potentials of REASON. Aristotle: The Soul is the Essence of the Self ❖ For Aristotle, the life worthy of all rational creatures is a life in the pursuit VIRTUE. ❖ It is in the practice of virtue that reason attains its utmost potentials. ❖ The good life, that happy life, is A LIFE OF VIRTUE. St. Augustine: The Self is the Divine in Us. ❖ Follows the idea that God encompasses us all, that everything will be better if we are with God. ❖ Believed that God and his teachings affect various aspects in life (everything is better if we devote ourselves in mending our relationship with God) ❖ Three things to know about the self. 1. Dualism 2. A desire for God 3. Sin St. Augustine: The Self is the Divine in Us. ❖ DUALISM: a philosophical view that there are two fundamental realities: spiritual and material. ❖ The human being is composed of two substances: body (material) and soul (spiritual). ❖ Following Plato, the soul is the most important about us. St. Augustine: The Self is the Divine in Us. ❖ Why is the soul the most important about us? ❖ The soul is not something that we have, it is something that WE ARE. ❖ The soul is not only the seat of our intellect and reason but of our EMOTIONS and DESIRES.  St. Augustine: The Self is the Divine in Us. ❖ Our desires urge us to live our lives in the ways that we do. ❖ Our deepest desires define the sorts of beings WE ARE and the sorts of beings WE CAN BE. ❖ Our deepest desire is a DESIRE FOR GOD. St. Augustine: The Self is the Divine in Us. ❖ Confessions: “Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee, my God.” ❖ A close relationship with God is what we really want. ❖ A close relationship with God is what we COULD BE if we choose to live as we OUGHT TO BE, but we DON’T CHOOSE to live as we ought to. St. Augustine: The Self is the Divine in Us. ❖ Our human nature is weak and PRONE TO SIN: we allow desire to rule reason. ❖ We are ruled by our emotions, passions, and desires—our LOVES. ❖ It does not mean that human nature is bad or evil; we just love the wrong things for the wrong reason. St. Augustine: The Self is the Divine in Us. ❖ To SIN is to be ruled by wrong desires—a DISORDERED LOVE. ❖ We desire what we should not, and avoid what we should desire. ❖ DISORDERED HUMAN NATURE: We love the wrong things and expect them to give us what they cannot.  St. Augustine: The Self is the Divine in Us. ❖ Only God, our Creator, knows what lies deep within our hearts—what ultimately will make us happy. ❖ Confessions: “God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.” ❖ To know oneself is to know God, our Maker, who designed us for a purpose the realization of which consists our happiness.  René Descartes: The Self is the Autonomous and Conscious Individual. French philosopher known to be the father of modern philosophy because of his radical use of systematic and scientific method to aid his ideas and assumptions. What we perceive and accepting the fact that doubting, asking questions are part of one’s existence. Known for the statement “cogito ergo sum” ( I think therefore I am). The more we think and doubt what we perceived from our senses and the answer that came from such thinking or doubting leads to better understanding of ourselves. René Descartes: The Self is the Autonomous and Conscious Individual. 1. RATIONALISM – a philosophical view which asserts that reason, rather than the senses, religious beliefs, or feelings and emotions, is the foundation of truth and certainty. ❖ The statement/ Cartesian dictum: “Cogito, ergo sum.” (“I think, therefore I am.”) is the proof of the indubitable existence of the thinking subject. René Descartes: The Self is the Autonomous and Conscious Individual. 2. DUALISM – a philosophical view which asserts that there are two fundamental categories of being: the mental and the physical (mind and body). a. RES COGITANS (the thinking being) – a being which thinks, doubts, understands, analyses, questions, and reasons which does not change. b. RES EXTENSA (the extended being) – a being which is extended in space and changes. René Descartes: The Self is the Autonomous and Conscious Individual. 3. MECHANISM – a philosophical view which asserts that nature is one vast machine whose movements and operations are governed by causal patterns. ❖ Mechanism is however only true with physical nature but not of human persons whose mind is nonphysical. ❖ Mechanism only governs the human body which is a thing of nature but not the human mind. René Descartes: The Self is the Autonomous and Conscious Individual. ❖ The self is my mind but not my body. ❖ My self as mind is known with certainty but my body may not exist. ❖ The mind exists independent of and even without the body. ❖ The self is an autonomous individual, one who is free to think act, and shape its own life. René Descartes: The Self is the Autonomous and Conscious Individual. ❖ The human body, like any other physical things in the world, is a kind of machine. ❖ Bodies, whether human or animal, are not themselves capable of thought or free choice. ❖ As conscious and free, I stand in dominion over my body and that of nature. ❖ I merely utilize my body to achieve my mind’s potentials. John Locke: The Self is the Continuity of Consciousness ❖ EMPIRICISM – a philosophical view which asserts that sense experience is the only source of knowledge. ❖ The human mind at birth is tabula rasa – a blank slate. ❖ As we go through life, the empty mind is written and shaped by experiences through sense perceptions. ❖ Knowledge is consciousness of ideas as formed by sense experiences. ❖ Consciousness is equated with or linked to memory, not to the soul. John Locke: The Self is the Continuity of Consciousness ❖ Self-knowledge is consciousness or memory of the self. ❖ Locke differentiates a “person” which is the thinking entity—what one refers to by the “self”—and the human being which is a physical reality. ❖ The self is an idea constructed from the accumulation of experiences. ❖ The essence of the self is the consciousness of the self as a thinking entity with all the ideas (mental contents) rooted from experience. John Locke: The Self is the Continuity of Consciousness ❖ We are the same person to the extent that we are conscious of the past and future thoughts and actions in the same way as we are conscious of present thoughts and actions. ❖ We become a different person the moment we forget our past and future thoughts and actions. The self exists only in as far as it remembers itself as it was, it is and it will be. John Locke: The Self is the Continuity of Consciousness ❖ The human being’s consciousness of itself, of its past and future is what separates man from unthinking beast.  David Hume: There is no Self But a Bundle of Experiences and Perceptions ❖ Being also an empiricist and an extreme one, Hume asserts that there are only two things that we really know for sure: 1. Impressions – sensations (heat and cold, rough and smooth) and feelings (hate, love, joy, pain) 2. Ideas – thoughts and images ❖ All ideas are faint copies of impressions. ❖ Ideas and impressions differ only in liveliness or vividness.  David Hume: There is no Self But a Bundle of Experiences and Perceptions ❖ Ideas of the self are inseparable from the impressions we accumulate from our perceptions and experiences. ❖ There is no such thing as spiritual, mental, or soul-like substantial self that goes beyond death. ❖ I AM THE SUM OF ALL MY PERCEPTIONS AND EXPERIENCES.  Immanuel Kant: The Self is the Organizing and Unifying Principle of Experience ❖ EPISTEMOLOGY – a branch of philosophy which studies and questions the nature, source, limits, and possibilities of human knowledge. ❖ Kant mediated the debate between empiricism and rationalism in history as to the source and foundation of human knowledge. Immanuel Kant: The Self is the Organizing and Unifying Principle of Experience ❖ German Philosopher that is known for his works on empiricism and rationalism ❖ Established that the collection of impressions and different contents is what it only takes to define a person ❖ Awareness of different emotions that we have, impressions and behaviors is only a part of our self  Immanuel Kant: The Self is the Organizing and Unifying Principle of Experience ❖ Knowledge must be the result or based on understanding which constructs/build/create the concept which unifies our scattered and inchoate sense experiences and sensibility which gives access to phenomena—sensible objects of experience. ❖ KNOWLEDGE = THOUGHT + SENSATION/INTUITION ❖ Self-knowledge always involve an understanding of self-concept and corresponding sense experience of that self-concept. ❖ SELF-KNOWLEDGE = SELF-CONCEPT + SELF-INTUITION  Immanuel Kant: The Self is the Organizing and Unifying Principle of Experience ❖ METAPHYSICS – a branch of philosophy which concerns questions concerning the fundamental nature of reality. ❖ Kant’s metaphysical distinction: 1. PHENOMENON – the appearance, an aspect of the thing or reality which we only know and is given to us through sense experience. 2. NOUMENON – the thing-in-itself, the aspect of the thing or reality which can never be known as it is inaccessible to sense experience.  Immanuel Kant: The Self is the Organizing and Unifying Principle of Experience ❖ Reality of self distinction: 1. PHENOMENAL SELF – the psychological/empirical self, the self as it appears or manifests to us through our conscious experiences, thoughts, feelings, desires, memories, etc. 2. NOUMENAL SELF – the self-in-itself, the self as it really is, but a self which we know nothing about as we do not have an experience or intuition of it. 3. TRANSCENDENTAL SELF – the formal self which consists of all the mechanisms of the mind which organize and synthesize the myriad/countless of our experiences into one coherent whole.  Immanuel Kant: The Self is the Organizing and Unifying Principle of Experience ❖ We have no knowledge of ourselves as we really are (noumenal self) but as we appear to ourselves (phenomenal self). ❖ What in part gives me a sense of who I am as ‘me’ is my transcendental self which unifies my phenomenal self. ❖ My self is the phenomenal self plus a sense of unity derived from the transcendental self.  Paul Churchland: The Self is the Brain ❖ ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM – the approach of developing new, neuroscience-based vocabulary to explain and communicate clearly about the mind, consciousness and human experience thereby eliminating folk psychology- based framework. ❖ The assumption of this approach is that to fully understand the nature of the mind we have to fully understand the nature of the brain. ❖ The mind is the brain, the brain is the mind. Paul Churchland: The Self is the Brain ❖ The body-mind problem cannot be solved by philosophers but by neuroscientists ❖ The self is the brain ❖ The mental state of the mind can impact on the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor of the self ❖ How can one perceive yourself and the choice you make? Paul Churchland: The Self is the Brain ❖ The concepts and theoretical vocabulary we use to think about our selves—using such terms as belief, desire, fear, sensation, pain, joy—actually misrepresent the reality of minds and selves. ❖ Materialists contend that in the final analysis, mental states are identical with, reducible to, or explainable in terms of physical brain states. ❖ Brain states determine your personality, who you are, what you choose, how you act and react to situations. Paul Churchland: The Self is the Brain ❖ To understand the nature of the mind, we must understand the brain…the physical abnormalities that are related to personality disorder can now be disclosed through the brain scans.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Self is Embodied Subjectivity ❖ PHENOMENOLOGY –the study of phenomena (lived experience). ❖ Studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. ❖ Maurice Merleau-Ponty declares: “I live in my body.” By the “lived body,” he means that my body can never be objectified or known in a completely objective sort of way, as opposed to the “body as object” of the dualists. ❖ The self lives in the body; hence without the body the self cannot exist Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Self is Embodied Subjectivity ❖ Our “living body” is a natural synthesis/combination of mind and biology, and any attempts to divide them into separate entities are artificial and nonsensical. ❖ When we examine our selves at the fundamental level of direct human experience, we discover that our mind and body are unified, not separate.  Gilbert Ryle: The Self is How People Behave ❖ The self is best understood as a pattern of behavior, the tendency or disposition of a person to behave in a certain way in certain circumstances ❖ (LOGICAL) BEHAVIORISM – a philosophical approach in attaining conceptual clarity by focusing on the dimension of the self which we can clearly observe: overt actions and behavior. ❖ No more inner selves, immortal souls, states of consciousness, or unconscious entities: instead, the self is defined in terms of the behavior that is presented to the world. ❖ We are our behavior and actions. We are what we do. Gilbert Ryle: The Self is How People Behave ❖ If Descartes says I think, therefore I am, Ryle retorts “I ACT; THEREFORE, I AM.” ❖ The mind is the totality of human dispositions knowable through the person’s observable behavior by way of inference/implication/interpretation at best. ❖ The more observant and aware you are of your dispositions and behavior, the more you know yourself. Gilbert Ryle: The Self is How People Behave ❖ ACTIVITY: What I Observe About My Behavior ❖ Identify TWO of the many defining qualities of your self: for example, empathetic, gregarious, reflective, fun-loving, curious, and so on. ❖ Then using Ryle and Hume explanation of the self, kindly explain or enumerate past experiences that made you or turn you to that qualities or descriptions of yourself.