What is a human person?

Metaphysical Approach -kinds of substances or materials and capacities that uniquely make
up a human person (what of a human person)

Existential Approach -kind of life, or mode of existence, that is unique to a human person
(who of a human person)

soul - life-giving function

mind - consciousness

spirit - nonbodily, nonbiological, nonphysical

What essentially makes up a human person?

- unspirited body view - body lang meron

-mind-brain identity theory: mind is nothing bu the brain

-behaviorism: mental state refers to show certain behaviors

- disembodied - the body will die without the spirit but the spirit will survive

-plato & rene descartes: substance dualism - recollection (plato) , immaterial

- “I think therefore I am”

- embodied spirit view - unity of body and spirit

-Aristotle & St. Thomas Aquinas: body = matter soul = form

-vegetative or nutritive soul / sensitive soul / rational soul

-Aquinas: subsistent (human soul though immortal is incomplete)

Marks of Mental - Mind’s Identity

- General Level: distinguish mental vs physical states

- Particular Level: distinguish mental states from one another

Five Major Properties:

-consciousness: awareness
Indicators:

-cognitions: knowing, believing

-emotions

-sensations: pains, tickles

-perceptions: senses

-quasi - perceptions: hallucinations, dreaming, imagining

-conations: purpose, desire, or will to perform an action;

-subjective quality or qualia: experience “quale” - phenomenal/ experiential feel

Thomas Nagel - asking someone what it is like to experience something

-intentionality: directed at some objects

mental states - inherent or original: not something we create or decide on

language, maps, and signs - derived or imposed: our creation or decision that
makes them intentional

-ontological subjectivity: mental states to exist only in so far as there is a subject who
has them or experience them

ontological objectivity: properties of physical objects to exist by themselves

-privacy: directly known only by the subject or person who has them

A being in the world

Martin Heidegger
- Dasein: being-in-the-world

Two Fundamental Features:

1. human person exists in a world

2. human person has a self that he/she defines as he/she exists in the world

-involvement or engagement: care “sorge”

-being-alongside: things appear as an equipment/ instrument

-being-with: human person empathizes with his/ her fellow human person

- equipmental world & social/public world

-temporality: past, present, future

-past: facticity
-present: falleness
-inauthentic existence: not the one making decision for himself

-authentic existence

-future: existentiality - possibilities that a human person can set for himself

-thrown possibility - death

TRANSCENDENCE AND LIMITATIONS

-intentionality
-intentional consciousness: outside

-self- consciousness: itself

-freedom and lack of fixed essence

-being-for-itself : consciousness / lack / incomplete

-being-in-itself: non conscious / full / complete

Factors:
-natural environment
-body
-other people