Lesson 1 - Philosophical Perspectives

Socrates

• “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

• “Know Thyself”

• Question Everything

• Only the Pursuit of Goodness Bring Happiness

Plato

• “Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.”

• Tripartite Soul

Ruling Class

rational part desires to exert reason and attain rational decisions

Military Class

spirited part desires supreme honor

Commoner

appetite part of the sould desires bodily pleasures such as food, drink, etc.

Aristotle

• “All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, and desire.”

• symbolic logic and scientific thinking

• happiness, which is dependent in an individual’s virtues, is the central purpose of human life and a goal in itself.

St. Augustine

• “The truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it. let it loose. It will defend itself.”

• “Do unto others, what you want other do unto you.”

• To love God means to love one’s fellowmen, and to love one’s fellowmen means never to do any harm to another.

Rene Descartes

• “Dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum." (I doubt therefore I think, I think therefore I am)

• Self is defined as a subject that thinks.

John Locke

• “No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.”

• “Our concept of personal identity must derive from inner experience.”

• posits an “empty mind,” a tabula rasa, which is shaped by experience, and sensations and reflections being the two sources of all our ideas.

• fixed by awareness of the past.

David Hume

• “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”

• He rejects the notion of identity over time.

• There are no “persons that continue to exist over time; there are merely impressions.

• “The self is a bundle of impressions.”

• The only things you are thinking about are individual impressions or perceptions of your self.

Immanuel Kant

• “To be is to do.”

• Consciousness is the central feature of the self.

Internal Self

composed of psychological states and informed decisions; remembering our own state, how can we combine the new and old ideas with our mind.

External Self

made up of ourselves and the physical world where the representation of objects.

Sigmund Freud

• “The child is the father of a man.”

• The self continues from childhood to adulthood

• Personality is determined by childhood experiences

• Personality is largely unconscious

• Structure of self

Id

animalistic self; pleasure principle

Ego

executive self: reality principle

Superego

conscience morality principle

Gilbert Ryle

• “I made it, and so I am.”

• “The dogma of the ghost in the machine… maintains that there exist but both bodies and minds.

• rejects the theory that mental states are separable from physical states

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

• “We know not through our intellect but through our experience.”

• his 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.