Philosopher Views of the Self

1. Immanuel Kant Kant's views on the mind are dependent on his idealism (he called it transcendental
idealism). Kant used inner sense to defend the heterogeneity of body and soul: "bodies
are objects of outer sense; souls are objects of inner sense" (Carpenter 2004). In Kant's
thought there are two components of the self: 1. inner self 2. outer self (Brooks 2004).
2. Sigmund Freud Analogous dualistic view of the self. Freud’s view of the self was multitier, divided
among the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The unconscious contains basic
instinctual drives including sexuality, aggressiveness, and self-destruction; traumatic
memories; unfulfilled wishes and childhood fantasies; thoughts and feelings that would
be considered socially taboo. The unconscious level is characterized by the most
primitive level of human motivation and human functioning. Unheedful of the
demands and restrictions of reality, the naked impulses at this level are governed
solely by the “pleasure principle.” In contrast, conscious self is governed by the “reality
principle” (rather than the “pleasure principle”), and at this level of functioning,
behavior and experience are organized in ways that are rational, practical, and
appropriate to the social environment. 
3. Rene Descartes Understanding the thinking process we use to answer questions. Human ability
to reason constitutes the extraordinary instrument we have to achieve truth and
knowledge. But instead of simply using reason to try to answer questions, Descartes
wanted to penetrate the nature of our reasoning process and understand its relation to
the human self. 
4. Paul Churchland He begins by acknowledging that a simple identity formula—mental states = brain
states—is a flawed way in which to conceptualize the relationship between the mind
and the brain. Instead, we need to develop a new, neuroscience-based vocabulary that
will enable us to think and communicate clearly about the mind, consciousness, and
human experience. He refers to this view as eliminative materialism.
5. St. Augustine As Augustine constructs a view of God that would come to dominate Western thinking,
he also creates a new concept of individual identity: the idea of the self. By telling this
tale he transforms himself into a metaphor of the struggle of both body and soul to
find happiness, which exists only in God's love.
6. Gilbert Ryle Arguing that the mind does not exist and therefore can't be the seat
of self, Ryle believed that self comes from behavior. We're all just a bundle of
behaviors caused by the physical workings of the body. Ryle’s behaviorism was a
different sort from that of psychology. He thought of his approach as
a logical behaviorism, focused on creating conceptual clarity, not on developing
techniques to condition and manipulate human behavior.
7. Maurice Phenomenology of Perception. This work asserts that self and perception are
Merleau-Ponty encompassed in a physical body. The physical body is part of self. “I live in my body.”
By the “lived body,” Merleau-Ponty means an entity that can never be objectified or
known in a completely objective sort of way, as opposed to the “body as object” of the
dualists.
8. John Locke Personal identity and survival of consciousness after death. A criterion of personal
identity through time is given. Such a criterion specifies, insofar as that is possible, the
 necessary and sufficient conditions for the survival of persons. John Locke holds that
personal identity is a matter of psychological continuity. He considered personal
identity (or the self) to be founded on consciousness (viz. memory), and not on the
substance of either the soul or the body.
9. David Hume Hume has no reason to believe in a self, thus, his theory is the 'no-self' theory of
the self. Hume: The self is perpetually identical and omnipresent. Common perception
of the self can, in reality, be rationalized as a collection of constant, omnipresent
instances of selves.
10. Plato Plato believed that humans could be broken down into 3 parts: the body, the mind and
the soul. The body is the physical part of the body that is only concerned with the
material world, and through which we are able to experience the world we live in. it
wants to experience self-gratification.
11. Socrates To know what “knowing yourself” and thereby “caring for yourself” means, they will
have to understand what “the self itself” means. He is saying that the notions of unity,
selfhood, and even agency cannot be avoided in talk of self-knowledge.
12. Aristotle Human being is a composite of body and soul and that the soul cannot be separated
from the body. Aristotle’s philosophy of self was constructed in terms of hylomorphism
in which the soul of a human being is the form or the structure of the human body or
the human matter, i.e., the functional organization in virtue of which human beings are
able to perform their characteristic activities of life, including growth, nutrition,
reproduction, perception, imagination, desire, and thinking.

Sources:
https://revelpreview.pearson.com/epubs/pearson_chaffee/OPS/xhtml/ch03_sec_08.xhtml
https://revelpreview.pearson.com/epubs/pearson_chaffee/OPS/xhtml/ch03_sec_04.xhtml
https://study.com/academy/lesson/self-behavior-according-to-gilbert-ryle.html
https://revelpreview.pearson.com/epubs/pearson_chaffee/OPS/xhtml/ch03_sec_10.xhtml
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3115296/
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https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4020-8596-3_6
http://www.powereality.net/hume-kant.htm
https://sites.psu.edu/moore/self-knowledge/
https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/augustine/section1/
 Different Views
of the Self
(according to Kant, Freud, Descartes,
Churchland, St. Augustine, Ryle,
Merleau-Ponty, Locke, Hume, Plato,
Aristotle and Socrates)

Evangelista, Althia Robert T.

BSA 1A

1:30-2:30
January 23, 2019