PHILOSOPHICAL VIEW OF THE SELF

philosophy
• is the science which studies the final or ultimate reasons of all things.
• It comes from two Greek words philos meaning “friend/lover,” and sophia meaning
“wisdom” hence the etymological definition of philosophy is “lover of wisdom.”

socrates
• was a Greek philosopher who was born in Athens in the year 469 B.C.E.
• he developed the “Socratic Method” or the method of inquiry and instruction consisting
of a series of questions the object of which is to elicit a clear and consistent expression of
something supposed to be implicitly known by all rational beings.
• the popular saying “Know Thyself” is commonly associated with Socrates, it emphasizes
that the true task of a wise and good man is knowing oneself.
• socrates states that knowledge is already inherent in us the key is discovering and it is
through wisdom and virtue. It is in introspection and reflection that man realizes the
answers to his existence and purpose.
• virtue and knowledge is the core of Socratic Ethics. Virtue is the deepest and most basic
propensity of man. They are desirable attitudes or character traits, motives, and emotions
that enable us to be successful and to act in ways that develop our highest potential.
Knowing one’s virtue is necessary and can be learned. Since virtue is innate in the mind
and self-knowledge is the source of all wisdom, an individual may gain possession of
oneself and be one’s own master through knowledge

plato
• he developed the Theory of Forms, according to which the world we know through the
senses is only an imitation of the pure, eternal, and unchanging world of the Forms.
• Rational Soul is the part that thinks, analyzes, looks ahead, rationally weigh options, and
gauge what is best and truest overall. Guides the horses and chariot
 o Appetitive Soul includes all our various desires for different pleasures, comforts,
physical, satisfactions, and bodily ease. (food, drink, sex, material wealth, etc.).
o Spirited Soul the part that gets angry when it perceives (for example) an injustice
being done. This is the part of us that loves to face and overcome great challenges,
the part that can steel itself to adversity, and that loves victory, winning, challenge,
and honor.
• Reason or the Rational Soul must always be in control in order to achieve harmony
and stability.
• plato emphasizes that justice and virtue in the human person can only be attained if
the three parts of the soul are working harmoniously with one another. When the ideal
state is attained, then man become just and virtuous.

aristotle
• For him Philosophy is Science, and Science is Philosophy
• For Aristotle, the world including the self is composed of two things which are Form and
Matter.
• Form is the determinate structure which gives things their essential characteristics or
attributes. It is the purpose of which the matter serves or its potentiality. An example: These
things are all legged platforms regardless of material, you can sit on, so they are the Form
of a Chair (chairness)
• Matter is the ultimate material or "stuff" out of which physical things are made or
composed of or the Actuality. An example: A chair’s matter is its material (wood, plastic,
nails, etc.).
• Aristotle believed that the form of an object was not some kind of abstract ideal. He
believed that the form of an object was contained within the object itself. To put it another
way, its form was within the structure itself. This meant that the form of an object
could be perceived using one's senses.

PLATO: The Real is immaterial and in the World of Forms ARISTOTLE: The Real is the
sensible or what can be perceived
st. augustine of hippo
• His original Latin name Aurelius Augustinus, bishop of Hippo from 396 to 430, one of
the Latin Fathers of the Church and perhaps the most significant Christian thinker after St.
Paul
• The Self for St. Augustine is that man is of a bifurcated nature; 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. The body is mortal and is destined to stay and die
on earth, however, the soul is to anticipate living eternally in a realm of spiritual bliss
in communion with God
• St. Augustine believes that a virtuous life is a dynamism of love. It is a constant following
of and turning towards love while a wicked life is a constant turning away from love

st. thomas aquinas

• He is regarded as the greatest of scholastic philosophers who lived from 1225 to 1274 in
Naples, Italy
• He is a member of the Order of Preachers or Dominicans and Catholic ecclesiastics
must accept Saint Thomas if they concern themselves with philosophy
• Aquinas said that man is composed of two parts: Matter and Form. Matter or hyle refers
to the common stuff that makes up everything in the universe. Man’s body is a part of this
matter. Form or morphe refers to the essence of a substance or thing. What makes us
humans is what animates our body which is the soul.
• Aquinas said the body is matter to the soul, and soul is form to the body. The matter or the
constituents that make up the body, are constantly changing while the man persists. The
man’s form or functional organization, or the organization of material parts by which an
animal accomplishes its vital functions, remains the same. This form is the man’s soul.
• body is necessary for a soul to exercise all vital capacities, since (almost) all vital functions
are the functions of body and soul together

Different kinds of souls (Aquinas)

• Vegetative soul - accounts for the functions of nutrition and reproduction
 • Sensitive soul - is by which higher animals perceive and respond to their environment.
This kind of soul, for some animals, also includes the power of locomotion
• Rational soul -is by which humans are able to use speech and have abstract thoughts.

rene descartes
• The Father of Modern Philosophy and the Father of Modern Mathematics.
• Descartes is often regarded as the first modern thinker to provide a philosophical
framework for the natural sciences as they began to develop
• He employs a method called methodological skepticism: he rejects any idea that can be
doubted, and then reestablishes them in order to acquire a firm foundation for genuine
knowledge
• Descartes is also famous for the statement “I think therefore I am.” The phrase first appears
in Discourse on the Method (1637). But Descartes changes the wording to “I am, I exist”
in his most famous work, Meditations on First Philosophy.
• The Self according to Descartes is conceived of the human person as having a BODY and
a MIND. The self then for Descartes is also a combination of two distinct entities, the
cogito the thing that thinks, which is the mind, and extenza or extension of the mind,
which is the body. For him, 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.

david hume
• He believed that, as he put it, "the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other
sciences."
• He said that human experience is as close are we are ever going to get to the truth, and that
experience and observation must be the foundations of any logical argument.
David Hume said that if one tries to examine his experiences, it can only be categorized into two:
• Impressions are the result of direct experience both internally and externally, it is engraved
in the soul with great vivacity. The basic objects of our experience or sensation. They
therefore form the core of our thoughts.
 Examples: Freezing because of the cold ocean water or the warm fuzzy feeling you feel
when you are in love
• Ideas, on the other hand, are copies of impressions. They are not as lively and vivid as our
impressions it means the image of these impressions which are weakened. While the
impression is received from outside, the idea is a simple copy, a reproduction of the
spontaneous impression.
Examples: When one imagines the feeling of being in love for the first time or the sourness
you taste in your mouth when you think of eating green mangoes
• The Self according to David Hume being an empiricist, who believes that one can know
only what comes from the senses and experiences, Hume argues that the self is nothing like
what his predecessors thought of it. The self is not an entity over and beyond the physical
body.
Empiricism
o is the school of thought that espouses the idea that knowledge can only be possible
if it is sensed and experienced. Men can only attain knowledge by experiencing.
For him, the Self is nothing else but a bundle of impressions.
• Personal Identity (Self) is founded on consciousness (memory/impressions), and not on
the substance of either the soul or the body. Hume said that the self is:
“A bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an
inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

john locke
• He is usually considered the first of the British Empiricists
• Along with Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he was also one of the originators
of Contractarianism (or Social Contract Theory), which formed the theoretical groundwork
of democracy, republicanism and modern Liberalism and Libertarianism.
• He is sometimes referred to as the "Philosopher of Freedom", and his political views
influenced both the American and French Revolutions.
• John Locke states that Personal Identity (the Self) is a matter of psychological continuity
which consists entirely in our ability to remember past thoughts and actions as our own.
Personal identity does not depend on the continuity of any given substance, whether
 material or immaterial, but instead refers only to “the sameness of a rational being”, or
consciousness. Consciousness of our present state makes us “self” to ourselves now, and
we are that same self to the extent that the same consciousness extends to past states and
recognizes them as its own.
• For him, Personal Identity is founded on consciousness (memory), and not on the
substance of either the soul or the body.

immanuel kant
• His works, especially those on Epistemology, Metaphysics and Ethics, such as his
masterworks the "Critique of Pure Reason" and the "Critique of Practical Reason",
achieved a complete paradigm shift and moved philosophy beyond the debate between the
Rationalists and Empiricists which had dominated the Age of Reason and the early Age of
Enlightenment, and indeed to combine those two apparently contradictory doctrines
• To Kant, there is necessarily a mind that organizes the impressions that men get from the
external world. Time and space, for example, are ideas that one cannot find in the world
but it is built in our minds. Kant calls these the apparatuses of the mind.
• Along with the different apparatuses of the mind goes the “self.” Without the self, one
cannot organize the different impressions that one gets in relation to his own existence.
Kant therefore suggests that it is an actively engaged intelligence in man that synthesizes
all knowledge and experience. 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
• Ryle was a 20th Century British philosopher, mainly associated with the Ordinary
Language Philosophy movement. He is best known for his criticism of what he called the
"Official Doctrine" of "Cartesian Dualism" as a theory of mind
• In his famous book, the Concept of Mind, he claimed that the mind does not exist. The
self is only a construct that we have as a result of human behavior whose motivations are
nothing sort of mysterious. “I act therefore I am” is a principle that reduces all of human
 action into a materialistic determinism. The self is best understood as a pattern of behavior,
the tendency or disposition for a person to behave in a certain way in certain circumstances.
• According to Ryle, the Self is not something you can pinpoint or directly see or know. The
Mind will never be found because it is a “Ghost in the Machine.” The Soul or Mind does
not equate as the Self. The “Self” is not an entity one can locate and analyze but simply
the convenient name that people use to refer to all behaviors that people make

paul churchland
• Eliminative Materialism is the radical claim that our ordinary, commonsense
understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited
by common sense do not actually exist.
• Churchland’s central argument is that 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. All of these concepts are part of a
commonsense “folk psychology” that obscures rather than clarifies the nature of human
experience
• The Self for Churchland can be roughly stated as the Brain itself. Materialists contend
that in the final analysis, mental states are identical with, reducible to, or explainable in
terms of physical brain states. Churchland’s ultimate concession that the psychology-based
conceptual framework currently used by most academic disciplines and popular culture
may not end up being completely eradicated and replaced by a neuroscience framework
still operates within his physicalist framework: for those “folk psychology” terms not
eliminated will nevertheless be reducible to neurophysical statements of brain states.

maurice merleau-ponty
• His primary philosophical contributions are his emphasis on perception and his notion of
corporeality as the lived bodily experience of the world, which for him is the basis of all
knowledge
For example, when you first wake up in the morning and experience your gradually expanding
awareness of where you are and how you feel, what are your first thoughts of the day? Perhaps
something along the lines of “Oh no, it’s time to get up, but I’m still sleepy, but I have an important
appointment that I can’t be late for” and so on.
• Note that at no point do you doubt that the “I” you refer to is a single integrated entity, a
blending of mental, physical, and emotional structured around a core identity: your self.
• 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.
• According to Merleau-Ponty, if we honestly and accurately examine our direct and
immediate experience of ourselves, these mind/body “problems” fall away. As Merleau-
Ponty explains, “There is not a duality of substances but only the dialectic of living
being in its biological milieu.” In other words, our “living body” is a natural synthesis of
mind and biology, and any attempts to divide them into separate entities are artificial and
nonsensical.
• The Self for Merleau-Ponty is simply the consciousness of a body which is embodied in
the world capable of experiencing and which is a natural synthesis of mind and biology.
(Embodied Subjectivity)