REPENZEL DELAZO PUNLA GE-1

BSED-1B MRS. REVELYN CANLAS

PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES OF SELF BY:

• SOCRATES- The philosophy of Socrates still shines today. Even the most distant philosophers of his
principles have discussed and debated his philosophy and teaching (Nietzsche for example).
The phrase “Know thyself” has not been invented by Socrates. It is a motto inscribed on the frontispiece
of the Temple of Delphi.

Socrates believed the best way for people to live was to focus on the pursuit of virtue rather than the
pursuit, for instance, of material wealth. He always invited others to try to concentrate more on
friendships and a sense of true community, for Socrates felt this was the best way for people to grow
together as a populace. His actions lived up to this standard: in the end, Socrates accepted his death
sentence when most thought he would simply leave Athens, as he felt he could not run away from or go
against the will of his community; as mentioned above, his reputation for valor on the battlefield was
without reproach.

The idea that there are certain virtues formed a common thread in Socrates's teachings. These virtues
represented the most important qualities for a person to have, foremost of which were the
philosophical or intellectual virtues. Socrates stressed that "the unexamined life is not worth living [and]
ethical virtue is the only thing that matters.

• DESCARTES- There are a few declarations we all just seem to know. There's 'No taxation without
representation,' there's 'We're gonna need a bigger boat!', and there's 'I think, therefore I am.' Since this
lesson is about Descartes and his concept of self, we're going to hone in on the whole 'I think, therefore I
am' proclamation.
As one of the most famous philosophers of all time, Rene Descartes is considered by the West to be the
'Father of Modern Philosophy.' Along with his contributions to math and the sciences, Descartes is firmly
linked to dualism, a concept he discusses in his work, Meditations on First Philosophy.
Descartes concludes that he can be certain that he exists because he thinks. But in what form? He
perceives his body through the use of the senses; however, these have previously been unreliable. So
Descartes determines that the only indubitable knowledge is that he is a thinking thing. Thinking is what
he does, and his power must come from his essence. Descartes defines "thought" (cogitatio) as "what
happens in me such that I am immediately conscious of it, insofar as I am conscious of it". Thinking is
thus every activity of a person of which the person is immediately conscious.[70] He gave reasons for
thinking that waking thoughts are distinguishable from dreams, and that one's mind cannot have been
"hijacked" by an evil demon placing an illusory external world before one's senses.

• PLATO- Plato, defined the soul as the core essence of a living being, but argued against its having a
separate existence. ... As the soul, in Aristotle's view, is an activity of the body, it cannot be immortal
(when a knife is destroyed, the cutting stops).
Plato's Forms thus represent types of things, as well as properties, patterns, and relations, to which we
refer as objects. Just as individual tables, chairs, and cars refer to objects in this world, 'tableness',
'chairness', and 'carness', as well as e. g. justice, truth, and beauty refer to objects in another world. One
of Plato's most cited examples for the Forms were the truths of geometry, such as the Pythagorean
theorem.
In other words, the Forms are universals given as a solution to the problem of universals, or the problem
of "the One and the Many", e. g. how one predicate "red" can apply to many red objects. For Plato this is
because there is one abstract object or Form of red, redness itself, in which the several red things
"participate". As Plato's solution is that universals are Forms and that Forms are real if anything is,
Plato's philosophy is unambiguously called Platonic realism. According to Aristotle, Plato's best known
argument in support of the Forms was the "one over many" argument.

• IMMANUEL KANT- Rationalism argues that reason, rather than experience, is the foundation of all
knowledge. According to Kant, both of these theories are incomplete when it comes to the self.
According to him, we all have an inner and an outer self which together form our consciousness.
In Kant's essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?", Kant defined the Enlightenment as
an age shaped by the Latin motto Sapere aude ("Dare to be wise"). Kant maintained that one ought to
think autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. His work reconciled many of the
differences between the rationalist and empiricist traditions of the 18th century. He had a decisive
impact on the Romantic and German Idealist philosophies of the 19th century. His work has also been a
starting point for many 20th century philosophers.

Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of argumentation in the absence of irrefutable evidence,
no one could really know whether there is a God and an afterlife or not. For the sake of morality and as
a ground for reason, Kant asserted, people are justified in believing in God, even though they could
never know God's presence empirically. He explained:

All the preparations of reason, therefore, in what may be called pure philosophy, are in reality directed
to those three problems only [God, the soul, and freedom]. However, these three elements in
themselves still hold independent, proportional, objective weight individually. Moreover, in a collective
relational context; namely, to know what ought to be done: if the will is free, if there is a God, and if
there is a future world. As this concerns our actions with reference to the highest aims of life, we see
that the ultimate intention of nature in her wise provision was really, in the constitution of our reason,
directed to moral interests only.

• DAVID HUME- To look for a unifying self beyond those perceptions is like looking for a chain apart
from the links that constitute it. Hume argues that our concept of the self is a result of our natural habit
of attributing unified existence to any collection of associated parts.
In what is sometimes referred to as Hume's problem of induction, he argued that inductive reasoning
and belief in causality cannot be justified rationally; instead, our trust in causality and induction result
from custom and mental habit, and are attributable only to the experience of "constant conjunction" of
events. This is because we can never actually perceive that one event causes another, but only that the
two are always conjoined. Accordingly, to draw any causal inferences from past experience it is
necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the past, a presupposition which cannot itself be
grounded in prior experience.[10]

Hume's opposition to the teleological argument for God's existence, the argument from design, is
generally regarded as the most intellectually significant attempt to rebut the argument prior to
Darwinism.

Hume was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on emotion or sentiment rather than
abstract moral principle, famously proclaiming that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the
passions". Hume's moral theory has been seen as a unique attempt to synthesise the modern
sentimentalist moral tradition to which Hume belonged, with the virtue ethics tradition of ancient
philosophy, with which Hume concurred in regarding traits of character, rather than acts or their
consequences, as ultimately the proper objects of moral evaluation.

• THOMAS AQUINAS- Aquinas begins his theory of self-knowledge from the claim that all our self-
knowledge is dependent on our experience of the world around us. Instead, Aquinas argues, our
awareness of ourselves is triggered and shaped by our experiences of objects in our environment.
Thomas Aquinas was a theologian and a Scholastic philosopher.[82] However, he never considered
himself a philosopher, and criticized philosophers, whom he saw as pagans, for always "falling short of
the true and proper wisdom to be found in Christian revelation."[83] With this in mind, Thomas did have
respect for Aristotle, so much so that in the Summa, he often cites Aristotle simply as "the Philosopher",
a designation frequently used at that time. Much of his work bears upon philosophical topics, and in this
sense may be characterized as philosophical. Thomas's philosophical thought has exerted enormous
influence on subsequent Christian theology, especially that of the Catholic Church, extending to Western
philosophy in general. Thomas stands as a vehicle and modifier of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism. It
is said that Thomas modified both Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism by way of heavy reliance on the
Pseudo-Dionysius

• AURELLIS AUGUSTINE- Augustine's sense of self is his relation to God, both in his recognition of God's
love and his response to it—achieved through self-presentation, then self-realization. Augustine
believed one could not achieve inner peace without finding God's love.
Aurelius served as a patron to Augustine while Augustine served as a priest in Hippo. Augustine sought
the establishment of a monastic community – for which space was granted by bishop Valerius – and was
funded by Aurelius. Aurelius provided the monastery with new members for the purpose of episcopal
training, effectively turning the monastery into a sort of early episcopal seminary.

• MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY- Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work is commonly associated with the
philosophical movement called existentialism and its intention to begin with an analysis of the concrete
experiences, perceptions, and difficulties, of human existence. However, he never propounded quite the
same extreme accounts of radical freedom, being-towards-death, anguished responsibility, and
conflicting relations with others, for which existentialism became both famous and notorious in the
1940s and 1950s. Perhaps because of this, he did not initially receive the same amount of attention as
his French contemporaries and friends, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.