Edrian E.

Catalan August 21, 2020

BSEd Math 1
GEC 11: Understanding the Self
Course Professor: Ms. Sheila Jessica A. Roallos

The Philosophical Perspective of the Self

1. Socrates (c. 470 BCE-399 BCE) - was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Athens,
Greece and was considered to be the main source and father of Western
philosophy. Plato's Symposium provides the best details of Socrates' physical
appearance. In his 50s, Socrates married Xanthippe which bore for him three
sons, Lamprocles, Sophroniscus and Menexenus. He was condemned to death
for his Socratic method of questioning. Socrates pointed out that human choice
was motivated by the desire for happiness. For him, a man consists of imperfect
and permanent body and a perfect and permanent soul. Ultimate wisdom comes
from knowing oneself. The more a person knows, the greater his or her ability to
reason and make choices that will bring true happiness. It was in court that
Socrates allegedly uttered the now-famous phrase, “an unexamined life is not
worth living.” On his last day, Plato says, he “appeared both happy in manner
and words as he died nobly and without fear.” He drank the cup of brewed
hemlock his executioner handed him, walked around until his legs grew numb
and then lay down, surrounded by his friends, and waited for the poison to reach
his heart.
2. Plato (c. 428 BCE–c. 348 BCE) - was an ancient Greek philosopher student of
Socrates and a teacher of Aristotle. His writings explored justice, beauty and
equality, and also contained discussions in aesthetics, political philosophy,
theology, cosmology, epistemology and the philosophy of language. Plato
founded the Academy in Athens, one of the first institutions of higher learning in
the Western world. He believed in the division of a person’s body and soul which
forms a person as a whole. He also believed that the soul is divided into 3
different parts that has different views, leading to different behaviors:
a. Appetitive soul- the part of the person that is driven by desire and need to satisfy
oneself by needs, desires, pleasures, objects, and situations.
b. Spirited soul- the courageous part of the person that is driven by competitiveness to
expect positive results and victory.
c. Rational soul- the drive of our lives and the part that thinks and plans for the future
which desides what and when to do that comes out possible results depending
on the actions.
When these are attained, the human person's soul become just and virtuous.
3. St. Augustine (A.D. 354 – 430) - also called Saint Augustine of Hippo, original Latin
name Aurelius Augustinus, (born November 13, 354, Tagaste, Numidia [now
Souk Ahras, Algeria]—died August 28, 430, Hippo Regius [now Annaba, Algeria];
feast day August 28), 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.
 St. Augustine also known as ‘spirit of man’ in medieval philosophy is a fourth
century philosopher whose groundbreaking philosophy infused Christian doctrine
with Neoplatonism. He is famous for being an inimitable Catholic theologian and
for his agnostic contributions to Western philosophy. Augustine tries to reconcile
his beliefs about freewill, especially the belief that humans are morally
responsible for their actions, with his belief that one’s life is predestined.
According to him, a man is of bifurcated nature in which part of man (body)
dwells in the world and yearns to be with divine, however, other part (soul) is
capable of reaching immortality and lives eternally in spiritual bliss with God. In
the third month of the siege of Hippo by the barbarian invaders, St. Augustine fell
ill of a fever and, after lingering more than ten days, died Aug. 28, 430.
4. Rene Descartes (1596-1650) - French philosopher considered the founder of
modern philosophy. A mathematician and scientist as well, Descartes was a
leader in the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. In his major work,
Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), he rigorously analyzed the established
knowledge of the time. Descartes and others were convinced that we need to
use our own thinking abilities to investigate, analyze, experiment, and develop
our own well-reasoned conclusions, supported with compelling proof.
Descartes’s quest for true knowledge led to his famous first principle and
keystone of concept of the self: Cogito, ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am” as he
was confident that no rational person will doubt his or her own existence as a
conscious, thinking entity—while we were aware of thinking about our self. Even
if we are dreaming or hallucinating, even if our consciousness is being
manipulated by some external entity, it is still our self-aware self that is dreaming,
hallucinating, or being manipulated. Thus, for him, human person consists of
body (perceives from the different senses) and mind (thinks, questions, and
doubts what the body has experienced).
5. John Locke (1632- 1704) - was an English philosopher and physician, widely
regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly
known as the "Father of Liberalism". Early on, Locke makes a linguistic
distinction between the terms ‘person’ and ‘man’. ‘Man’ he defines as having both
an “immaterial spirit” and “a living organized body”, in which “different particles”
are “successively united” as they participate within “the same continued life”. To
be the “same man” over time is simply a matter of establishing the continuity of
certain material and immaterial substances. In his most important work, the
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke set out to offer an analysis of
the human mind and its acquisition of knowledge. He offered an empiricist theory
according to which we acquire ideas through our experience of the world. The
mind is then able to examine, compare, and combine these ideas in numerous
different ways. Knowledge consists of a special kind of relationship between
different ideas. Locke’s emphasis on the philosophical examination of the human
mind as a preliminary to the philosophical investigation of the world and its
contents represented a new approach to philosophy.
6. David Hume (1711- 1776) - was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian,
economist, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system
 of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Hume is against those
philosophers, who believe in the conception that we have an idea of a
permanent, independent and immaterial self and its continuous identity. He is not
satisfied with this thinking that the idea of self is the foundation of all our
emotions, passions, thoughts and desires etc. He thinks that all these are
different and separate from each other and may be separately consider and
exist. For Hume self is neither a body, nor a mind, nor a combination of both, nor
an unknown substance as some thinkers generally say and defend. It is only a
series of experiences, a strew of feelings, sensations, desires, thoughts, beliefs,
etc. After that he considers the problem of personal identity by adopting the
classical exposition of the positivist’s theory of personal identity. It is the view of
those thinkers, who adopted skeptical view and also think that the idea of self
can be described in the empirical or linguistic formula. It is common to all
positivist that they think self is an abstraction from the facts with no ontological
status of its own. For him, self is nothing but a bunch of impressions and ideas.
7. Immanuel Kant (1724- 1804) – a German philosopher and was one of the most
important philosophers of the Enlightenment Period (c. 1650-1800) in Western
European history. According to him, we all have an inner and an outer self which
together form our consciousness. The inner self is comprised of our
psychological state and our rational intellect. The outer self includes our sense
and the physical world. When speaking of the inner self, there is apperception.
For him, the self is not only the personality but a seat of knowledge thus we need
active intelligence to synthesize all knowledge and experiences.
8. Sigmund Freud (1856- 1939) - father of psychoanalysis, was a physiologist, medical
doctor, psychologist and influential thinker of the early twentieth century and
considered to be the founder of the psychodynamic approach to psychology,
which looks to unconscious drives to explain human behavior. Freud believed
that the mind is responsible for both conscious and unconscious decisions that it
makes on the basis of psychological drives. The id, ego, and super-ego are three
aspects of the mind in which Freud believed to comprise a person's personality.
Freud believed people are "simply actors in the drama of [their] own minds,
pushed by desire, pulled by coincidence, underneath the surface, our
personalities represent the power struggle going on deep within us". Freud’s view
of the self was multilayered, divided among the conscious, preconscious, and
unconscious. The conscious self is governed by the reality principle. The
unconscious contains the basic instinctual drives and governed by the pleasure
principle. The preconscious is between conscious and unconscious part of the
self that is not threatening and is easily brought to mind.
9. Gilbert Ryle (1900- 1976) - was a British philosopher, principally known for his
critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "ghost in the
machine" view (man is a complex machine with different functioning parts,
intelligence, and other characteristics and behavior of man). “The self is the way
people behave”. The self is basically our behavior. This concept provided the
philosophical principle, “I act therefore I am”. In short, the self is the same as
 bodily behavior. His idea is saying that the things that we do things accompanied
with reactions and behaviors define us generally as a person.
10. Paul Churchland ( 1977- present) – was a Canadian philosopher known for his
studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. “The self is the brain”,
stated that the self and brain are one. Basically if there is no brain, there would
be no self. In short, the concept means the self is defined by the movement of
our brain. Rather than dualism, Churchland holds to materialism, the belief that
nothing but matter exists. When discussing the mind, this means that the
physical brain, and not the mind, exists. Adding to this, the physical brain is
where we get our sense of self. Because the mind is the seat of our
consciousness, it’s what gives us our identity. No, we can’t see it, taste it, or
touch it, but it does exist. Not only does it exist, but it is what makes self, self.
11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908- 1961) - was a French phenomenological
philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The
constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote
on perception, art, and politics. Merleau-Ponty believed the physical body to be
an important part of what makes up the subjective self. This concept stands in
contradiction to rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism asserts that reason and
mental perception, rather than physical senses and experience, are the basis of
knowledge and self. According to Merleau-Ponty, the human body is an
expressive space which contributes to the significance of personal actions. The
body is also the origin of expressive movement, and is a medium for perception
of the world. Bodily experience gives perception a meaning beyond that
established simply by thought. Thus, Descartes’ cogito ("I think, therefore I am")
does not account for how consciousness is influenced by the spatiality of a
person’s own body.