The Self from Various Philosophical Perspectives

• "philo" - means love; "sophia" means wisdom
• Philosophy - study of acquiring knowledge through rational thinking and inquiries that involve in answering questions regarding nature and existence
• Pre-socratic - philosophers who preceded Socrates; primary concern: explaining what the world is really made up of.
• Pre-Socratic Philosophers:

  • Thales
  • Pythagoras
  • Parmenides
  • Heraclitus
  • Empedocles
• Socrates - the first philosopher who ever engaged in a systematic questioning about the self
• Socrates - the true task of a philosophers is to know oneself
• Socrates - “An unexamined life is not worth living"
• Dualism - man is composed of body and soul
• Plato - student of Socrates, who supported his idea that man is dual in nature
• Three Components of the Soul:

  • Rational Soul
  • Spirited Soul
  • Appetitive Soul
• Rational Soul - forged by reason and intellect to govern the affairs of the human person.
• Spirited Soul - in charge of emotions
• Appetitive Soul - in charge of human desires like eating, drinking, sleeping, and having sex
• Augustine - an aspect of man dwells in the world and is imperfect and continuously yearns to be with the Divine and the other is capable of reaching immortality
• Augustine - body is bound to die on earth and the soul is to anticipate living eternally in a realm of spiritual bliss in communion with God
• According to Augustine, the ultimate goal of every human person is to attain this communion and bliss with the Divine
• Thomas Aquinas - concept of dualism: matter and form
• Matter (hyle) - refers to the “common stuff that makes up everything in the universe”; man’s body is part of this
• Form (morphe) - the essence of a substance or thing; it is what makes it what it is
• Soul - what animates the body; it is what makes us humans; it is our essence
• Rene Descartes - "Father of Modern Philosophy"
• Rene Descartes - conceived of the human person as having a body and a mind
• Rene Descartes - the proponent of “methodical doubt"
• "Cogito, ergo sum" - means "I think therefore, I am"
• Methodical Doubt - we should only believe the things which can pass the test of doubt
• Two Distinct Entities of the Self

  • Cogito
  • Extenza
• Cogito - mind; the thing that thinks
• Extenza - the body; extension of the mind
• David Hume - a Scottish philosopher who uphold empiricism; he believes that one can know only what comes from the senses and experiences
• Empiricism - to attain knowledge by experiencing
• Categorization of Experiencing

  • Impressions
  • Ideas
• Immanuel Kant - synthesized two school of thought: rationalism & empiricism
• Immanuel Kant - self is what makes the organization of different impressions possible; an actively engaged intelligence that synthesizes all knowledge and experiences
• Gilbert Ryle - solved the body-mind dichotomy by blatantly denying the concept of an internal, non-physical self
• Gilbert Ryle - For him, what truly matters is the behavior that a person manifests in his day-to-day life
• Gilbert Ryle - Self is not an entity one can locate and analyze but simply the convenient name that people use to refer to all the behaviors that people make
• Merleau-Ponty - a phenomenologist who says the mind-body bifurcation is an invalid problem
• Merleau-Ponty - For him, the mind and body are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from one another