Lesson 1&2 Flashcards
“The unexamined life is not worth living”
Socrates
was the first philosopher who ever engaged in a systematic questioning about the self; the true task of the philosopher is to know oneself.
Socrates
every man is composed of body and soul; all individuals have an imperfect, impermanent aspect to him: the body, while maintaining that there is also a soul that is perfect and permanent.
Socrates
- We should know how we ought to live
- This requires self knowledge where;
- The true self is our soul and;
- We should CARE for our soul to be virtuous and happy
Socrates
Plato supported the idea of the
“Dualism of Body and Soul”
Soul is the seat of reason and source of true and immortal self
Plato
Plato added that there are three components of the soul:
rational soul, the spirited soul, and the appetitive soul.
– Soul has rational part
– What makes human beings unique is the possession of soul and intellect
Aristotle
___ agreed that man is of a bifurcated nature; the 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.
- Soul and intellect exists but only intellect has substantial form
- The body can only thrive in the imperfect, physical reality that is the world, whereas the soul can also stay after death in an eternal realm with the all-transcendent God.
- Intellect is what makes us human, enables thought and language unlike animals
- Abstractions from experience, agent intellect and receptive intellect, not only perception but ideas
St. Augustine
Aquinas said that indeed, man is composed of two parts:
matter and form
Matter, or ____ in Greek, refers to the “common stuff that makes up everything in the universe.”
hyle
in Greek refers to the “essence of a substance or thing.”
morphe
the soul is what animates the body; it is what makes us humans
Aquinas
“But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understand, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses.”
Rene Descartes
____ knows that he exists and continues to exists as long as he is a thing that thinks
- Conceived of the human person as having a body and a mind
- This consciousness that allows us to know that we exist composes our soul which is a substance
- The body is nothing else but a machine that is attached to the mind. The human person has it, but it is not what makes man a man. If at all, that is the mind.
- The self/identity depends on consciousness
Descartes
We are born in a blank slate
“Tabula Rasa”
He distinguishes between a substance (the soul) and consciousness
John Locke
Memory provides an infallible link between what we might call different stages of a person
John Locke
John Locke Two objections:
- We forget much of what we experience
- Our memories are not always accurate
The self is not an entity over and beyond the physical body.
- Men can only attain knowledge by experiencing.
- Self, according to _____, “is simply an illusion - a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
- We are more influenced by feelings than reason, reason is the slave of passion
- There is need for :
- Education passions - learn to be more benevolent and patient
- Need for public intellectuals rather than professors to change people’s belief by sympathy, good example
David Hume
learn to be more benevolent and patient
Education passions
Things that men perceive around them are not just randomly infused into the human person without an organizing principle that regulates the relationship of all these impressions.
- There is necessarily a mind that organizes the impressions that men get from the external world.
- Time and space are ideas that one cannot find in the world but is built in our minds; he calls these the apparatuses of the mind.
- Two fold nature of humans
Immanuel Kant
essence of things beyond experience, God-like self, intellect
Homo noumenon
things as it appears to observer, human self, physical
Homo phaenoumenon
endowed with freedom, or agency, and can be subjected to moral obligation, true and real self that needs to be actualized
Noumenal self
enables knowing noumenal self
Phaenoumenon self
Blatantly denying the concept of an internal, non-physical self; what truly matters is the behavior that a person manifests in his day-to-day life.
- “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.
Gilbert Ryle
The mind and body are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from one another.
- One cannot find any experience that is not an embodied experience. All experience is embodied; one’s body is his opening toward his existence to the world.
- The living body, his thoughts, emotions, and experiences are all one.
Merleau-Ponty
We experience the world though our body
Embodied Subjectivity
Experience changes the mind
Being in the World
is an important part of the self and acts as one system with the mind
physical body
We imbue the world with our own value and meaning
crucial to how we subjectively experience the world
means that the self is distinct from other selves. The self is always unique and has its own identity.
Separate
because it can exist in itself . Its distinctness allows it to be self-contained with its own thoughts, characteristics, and volition.
Self-contained and independent
means that a particular self’s traits, characteristics, tendencies, and potentialities are more or less the same.
Consistency
in that it is the center of all experiences and thoughts that run through a certain person
Unitary
means that each person sorts out information, feelings and emotions, and thought processes within the self. This whole process is never accessible to anyone but the self.
Private
According to ____, every self has two faces: ___&____
Marcel Mauss;
Moi, Personne
refers to a person’s sense of who he is, his body, and his basic identity, his biological givenness.
Moi
is composed of the social concepts of what it means to be who he is.
Personne
is another interesting aspect of this social constructivism; it is a salient part of culture and ultimately, has a tremendous effect in our crafting of the self.
Language
More than his givenness (,,,), one is believed to be in active participation in the shaping of the self.
personality, tendencies, and propensities, among others
For _____ & ______, the way that human persons develop is with the use of language acquisition and interaction with others.
- Both ______treat the human mind as something that is made, constituted through language as experienced in the external world and as encountered in dialogs with others.
Mead and Vygotsky
• a person’s distinct identity that is developed through social interaction
• In order to engage in this process of “self,” an individual must be able to view him or herself through the eyes of others
• This assists us in becoming self-aware, as we look at ourselves from the perspective of the “other.”
George Herbert Mead
Mead’s Stages of Self Development:
The Preparatory Stage
The Play Stage
The Game Stage
- children are only capable of imitation
- they have no ability to imagine how others see things
Preparatory
- children begin to take on the role that one other person might have
- children might try on a parent’s point of view by acting out “grownup” behavior
- like playing “dress up” and acting out the “mom” role, or talking on a toy telephone the way they see their father.
The Play Stage
- children learn to consider several roles at the same time and how those roles interact with each other
- They learn to understand interactions involving different people with a variety of purposes
The Game Stage
• Zone of Proximal Development
• Emphasis of the “Expert Role” in the learning process
Vygotsky and Scaffolding
These expert can be known as:
• Parents
• Teachers
• Peers
• Many more
In trying to achieve the goal of becoming a fully realized human, a child enters a system of relationships, most important of which is the
family
is one of those loci of the self that is subject to alteration, change, and development.
- The sense of self that is being taught makes sure that an individual fits in a particular environment, is dangerous and detrimental in the goal of truly finding one’s self, self-determination, and growth of the self.
- It is important to give one the leeway to find, express, and live his identity.
- ____ has to be personally discovered and asserted and not dictated by culture and the society.
Gender
