UNDS Week 1 Flashcards
aimed at unravelling who man is and his nature by looking, not just on the everyday goals, but to determine what ultimately is man, his goals, and his essences
PHILISOPHICAL
QUEST
THE SELF (4)
- Self-concept
- Self-knowledge
- Self-esteem
- Social self
- quoted: ‘‘Know Thyself’’
- Born in Athens
- Market Philosopher
- from universe to examination of our existence in the universe
- “an unexamined life is not worth living”
Socrates
(469 - 399 BC)
- quoted: ‘‘If we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself’’
- Athenian Family involved in the rule of the Thirty Tyrants
- founded an Academy, prototype of modern university
- Dichotomy of the Ideal World (World of Forms) and the Material World
- human beings are composed of two things: body and soul contemplation
- We continue to exist even without our bodies because we are Souls only.
Plato
(427 - 347 BCE)
- quoted: ‘‘But my sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in Him but in myself and His other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error’’
- North Africa, Bishop of Canterbury
- difficult to reconcile a loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful God with the evils in the world.
- Material World is not our final home, we are just passing through it
- Only God is fully real
- God created man
- moral law exists and is imposed in the mind
Augustine
(354 - 430)
- quoted: ‘‘I think, therefore I am’’
- Father of Modern Philosophy
- Cogito, ergo sum
- essence lay in being a purely thinking being - echoes the dualism of Plato
- mind is conjoined with the body in such an intimate way that they casually act upon each other
- the Self being the mind more than the body
Rene Descartes
(1596 - 1650)
- quoted: ‘‘What Worries you, masters you’’
- Father of Classical Liberalism
- first British empiricist philosopher
- laid the foundation of human rights; sovereign should be the people, not the monarch
- our identity is not locked in the mind, soul or body only memory theory
- as long as somebody remembers or as long as memories are around, I am around
John Locke
(1632 - 1704)
- quoted: ‘‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’’
- Scotland, lawyer, History of England, empiricist
- senses as our key source of knowledge
- impression and ideas
- Treatise of Human Nature: “I” will constantly be changing because the difference experiences one has for every constant change will affect and re shape that person
David Hume
(1711 - 1776)
- quoted: ‘‘All knowledge begins with senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason’’
- East Prussia
- it is possible to discover universal truth about the world using reasons; possible to find essence of the Self
- man is a free agent, capable of making decisions for himself
- reason and free will
- a moral persona is one who is driven by duty and acts towards the fulfillment of that duty
- only a free agent will be able to make a rational deliberation
Immanuel Kant
(1724 - 1804)
- quoted: ‘‘The ego is not master in its own house’’
- Jewish neurologist
- Father of Psychoanalysis
- structure that defines man according to his biological structure and the influence of socio-cultural environment
- id, ego, superego
Sigmund Freud
(1856 - 1939)
- quoted: ‘‘Minds are things, but different sorts of things from bodies’’
- philosophy that centers on language; clear confusion through linguistic analysis
- Ghost in the Machine; Cartesian category
Gilbert Ryle
(1900 - 1976)
- quoted: We do have an organ for understanding and recognizing moral facts. It is called the brain
- Eliminative Materialism
- self is the brain
- neuroscience
Paul Churchland
(b. 1942)
- quoted: ‘‘We know not through our intellect but through our experience’’
- a person is defined by virtue of movement and expression
- I am the sum of all what I make my body do
- self as a continuous flow of movement and expression from infancy through adulthood
Maurice Merleau - Ponty
(1908 - 1961)
“the self is an immortal soul that exists overtime’’
Socrates, Plato, Augustine
“personal identity is made possible by self-consciousness’’
John Locke
“the self is embodied subjectivity’’
Merleau-Ponty
“there is no ‘self’, only a bundle of constantly changing perceptions in our mind’’
David Hume
“the self is a thinking thing, distinct from the body’’
Descartes
“the self is the brain.”
Paul Churchland
“the self is the way people behave”
Gilbert Ryle
“the self is a unifying subject, an organizing consciousness that makes intelligible experiences possible”
Immanuel Kant
“the self is multi-layered’’
Sigmund Freud
