General-Education-Subjects-2

Understanding the Self

• Dual-Aspect of the Human Person
  • Imperfect & impermanent: physical body
  • Perfect & permanent: soul
  • Socrates: “An unexamined life is not worth living” – ignorance of one’s virtues is the worst fate.

• Socratic–Platonic Line
  • Plato’s tripartite soul
  – Reason (rational part)
  – Spirit (spirited part) – accounts for emotions & enforces reason in pursuit of honor
  – Appetite (desires)
  • Goal: justice occurs when each part performs its proper function under the guidance of reason.
  • Body seen as prison of the soul, which yearns to return to the world of Forms/the Divine.

• Augustinian Synthesis
  • St. Augustine: body is imperfect and earth-bound; soul’s love of God perfects the person. Virtuous earthly life enables eventual union with God.

• Cartesian Philosophy
  • Person = cogito (thinking mind) + extensa (body as extension).
  • Universal methodic doubt; the only indubitable truth is: \text{Cogito ergo sum} (I think, therefore I am).

• Empiricism vs. Rationalism
  • John Locke: self = consciousness; can theoretically transfer from one body to another. Ideas derive from experience.
  • David Hume: contents of mind = impressions (vivid sensations) vs. ideas (faint copies of impressions). No permanent “self” beyond the bundle of perceptions.
  • Immanuel Kant: while knowledge begins with experience, there must be a transcendental ego that organizes sensations using a priori categories; reason is the ultimate foundation of knowledge.
  • Gilbert Ryle: attacks “ghost in the machine”; mind is not a separate substance.
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty: mind and body are inter-twined; bodily experience is the