Self Dayaoskiii
Self Dayaoskiii
Self is something that a person perennially molds, shapes, and develops. Not a
static thing that one is simply born with. Everyone is tasked to discover one’s self.
The philosophical Perspective is the Inquiry into the fundamental nature of the self.
The inquiry has preoccupied the earliest thinkers in the history of philosophy
Greeks. Views on the self can be best understood by revisiting its prime movers
and identify the most important conjectures made by philosophers
For Socrates, every man is composed of body and soul. This means that every
human is dualistic, that is, he is composed of two important aspects of
personhood. This means all individuals have an imperfects impermanent aspect to
him, and the body, while maintaining that there is also a soul that is perfect and
permanent. Plato, Socrates’s student, basically took off from his master and
supported the idea that man is a dual nature of body and soul. Nonetheless, Plato
Socrates and Plato
added three components of the soul and that is the rational soul, the spirited soul,
and the appetitive soul.in his magnum opus, “The Republic” (Plato 2000), Plato
emphasizes that justice in the human person can only be attained if soul forged
by reason and intellect has to govern the affairs of the human person, the spirited
part which is in charge of emotions should be kept at bay, and the appetitive soul
in charge of base desires like eating, drinking , sleeping , and having sex are
controlled as well.
To Augustine’s point of view of the human person reflects the entire spirit of the
medieval world when it comes to man. Augustine agreed that man is of a
bifurcated nature (dived by two). The body is bound the die on earth and soul
Augustin and Thomas is to anticipate living eternally in a realm of spiritual bliss in communion with
Aquinas God. From Aquinas view that adapts some ideas from Aristotle. Aquinas said
that “indeed, man is composed of two parts: matter and form. The soul is
what animates the body; it is what makes us humans.
Father of Modern Philosophy, The human person has it but it not what makes man
a man. If at all that is the mind. Rene Descartes is also a combination of two
Rene Descartes distinct entities, the cogito, and the thing that thinks, which is the mind and the
extenza or extension of the mind which is the body. To Rene Descartes’s view,
the body is nothing else but a machine that is attached to the mind.
The idea of the self doesn’t persist overtime. There is no you that is the same
person from birth to death. He said the concept of the self is just an illusion. This
could be either liberating or terrifying, depending on how you look at it. To David
Hume, the self is nothing else but a bundle of impressions, consisting of a
zillion different things – my body, my mind, and my emotions, preferences,
David Hume memories, even labels that are imposed on me by others. What are
impressions? For David Hume, if one tries to examine his experiences, he finds
that they can all be categorized into two: impressions and ideas. Impressions are
the basic objects of our experience or sensation. They therefore form the core of
our thoughts. Example: When one touches an ice cube, the cold sensation is an
impression.
I Thinking of the “self” as a mere combination or impressions was problematic for
mmanuel Kant Immanuel Kant. Kant recognizes the veracity of Hume’s account that everything
starts with perception and sensation of impressions. However, Kant thinks that the
things that men perceive around them are not just randomly infused into the
human person without and organizing principle that regulates the
relationship of all these impressions. Thus, the self is not just what gives one
his personality. In addition, it is also the seat of knowledge acquisition for all
human persons.
Gilbert Ryle For Ryle, looking for and trying to understand a self as it really exists is like visiting
your friend’s university and looking for the “university”. The “self” is not and
entity one can locate and analyze but simply the convenient name that
people use to refer to all the behaviors that people make. One can roam
around the campus, visit the library and the football field, and meet the
administrators and faculty still end up not finding the “university”.
Merleau-Ponty Unlike Ryle who simply denies the “self”, Merleau-Ponty instead says that the
mind and body are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from one another.
Once cannot find any experience that is not an embodied experience. All
experience is embodied. One’s body is his opening to toward are in the world.
Merleau-Ponty dismisses the Cartesian Dualism that has spelled so much
devastation in the history of man. For him, The Cartesian problem is nothing else
but plain misunderstanding. The living body, his thoughts, emotions, and
experiences are all one.
Self
Something that a person perennially molds, shapes, and develops
The inquiry has preoccupied the earliest thinkers in the history of philosophy
greeks.
Views on the self can be best understood by revisiting its prime movers and
identify the most important conjectures made by philosophers
Socrates
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing"
KNOW THYSELF
Question everything
Socratic Method: Question and Answer; Leads students to think for themselves.
Plato
"Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and
knowledge."
Dualism
man is a dual nature, composed of BODY AND SOUL
Tripartite Soul
REASON, SPIRIT, APPETITE
Reason (ruling class) - desires to exert reason and attain rational decisions
Appetite (commoner) - desires body pleasures such as food, drink, sex, etc.
Aristotle
"All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature,
compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire."
The best way to gain knowledge was through "natural philosophy", which is what
we would now call science.
His philosophy of man brings together wisdom of the Greek philosophy and the
divine truths contained in the scripture.
The absolute and immutable is the living God, the creator of the entire universe.
To love God means to love one's fellowmen, and to love one's fellowmen means
never to do any harm to another.
"Dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum" (I doubt therefore I think, I think therefore I
am)
The self that has full competence in the powers of human reason.
Having distanced the self from all sources of truth from authority and tradition, the
self can only find its truth and authenticity within its own capacity to think.
Locke posits an "empty" mind, a tabula rasa, which is shaped by experience, and
sensations and reflections being the two sources of all our ideas.
There are no "persons" that continue to exist over time, there are merely
impressions.
Rejects the theory that mental states are separable from physical states.
His form of Philosophical Behaviorism (the belief that all mental phenomena can
be explained by reference to publicly observable behavior) became a standard
view for several decades.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
"We know not through our intellect but through our experience."
Consciousness, the world, and the human body as a perceiving thing are
intricately intertwined and mutually "engaged"
Our perception of the self is a collection of our perceptions of our outside world.