St.

Augustine

Biography

Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430), bishop and Doctor of the

Church is best known for his Confessions (401), his autobiographical
account of his conversion. The term augustinianism evolved from his
writings that had a profound influence on the church.
Augustine was born at Tagaste (now Algeria) in North Africa on
13 November, 354. His father, Patricius, while holding an official
position in the city remained a pagan until converting on his deathbed.
His mother, Saint Monica, was a devout Christian. She had had
Augustine signed with the cross and enrolled among the catechumens
but unable to secure his baptism. Her grief was great when young
Augustine fell gravely ill and agreed to be baptised only to withdraw his consent upon recovery,
denouncing the Christian faith.
At the encouragement of Monica, his extensive religious education started in the schools of
Tagaste (an important part of the Roman Empire) and Madaura until he was sixteen. He was off to
Carthage next in 370, but soon fell to the pleasures and excesses of the half pagan city’s theatres,
licentiousness and decadent socialising with fellow students. After a time, he confessed to Monica that
he had been living in sin with a woman with whom he had a son in 372, Adeodatus, (which means Gift of
God).
Still a student, and with a newfound desire to focus yet again on exploration of his faith, in 373
Augustine became a confirmed Manichaean, much against his mother’s wishes. He was enticed by its
promise of free philosophy which attracted his intellectual interest in the natural sciences. It did not
however erase his moral turmoil of finding his faith. His intellect having attained full maturity, he returned
to Tagaste then Carthage to teach rhetoric, being very popular among his students. Now in his thirties, his
spiritual journey led him away from Manichaeism after nine years because of disagreement with its
cosmology and a disenchanting meeting with the celebrated Manichaean bishop, Faustus of Mileve.
Passing through yet another period of spiritual struggle, Augustine went to Italy in 383, studying
Neo-platonic philosophy. Enthralled by his kindness and generous spirit, he became a pupil of Ambrose.
At the age of thirty-three, the epiphany and clarity of purpose which Augustine had sought for so long
finally came to him in Milan in 386 through a vast stream of tears as he lay prostrate under a fig tree. He
was baptised by Ambrose in 387 much to the eternal delight of his mother, “..nothing is far from God.”
The next event in his life leads to some of the most profound and exquisite writings on love and grief; the
death of his mother Monica.
Surrounded by friends, Augustine now returned to his native Tagaste where he devoted himself
to the rule in a quasi-monastic life to prayer and studying sacred letters and to finding harmony between
the philosophical questions that plagued his mind and his faith in Christianity. He was ordained as priest
in 391.
For the next five years Augustine’s priestly life was fruitful, consisting of administration of church
business, tending to the poor, preaching and writing and acting as judge for civil and ecclesiastical cases,
always the defender of truth and a compassionate shepherd of souls. At the age of forty-two he then
became coadjutor-bishop of Hippo. From 396 till his death in 439, he ruled the diocese alone. At that point
the Roman Empire was in disintegration, and at the time of his death the Vandals where at the gates of
Hippo. 28 August, 430, in the seventy-sixth year of his age Augustine succumbed to a fatal illness. His relics
were translated from Sardinia to Pavia by Luitprand, King of the Lombards. Saint Augustine is often
depicted as one of the Four Latin Doctors in many paintings, frescoes and stained glass throughout the
world. “Unhappy is the soul enslaved by the love of anything that is mortal.” Saint Augustine. The cult of
Augustine formed swiftly and was widespread. His feast is celebrated on 28 August.
Saint Augustine’s books, essays and letters of Christian Revelation are probably more influential
in the history of thought than any other Christian writer since St. Paul, namely his Confessions, sermons
on the Gospel and the Epistle of John, the The Trinity (400-416) and what he finished late in life, the The
City of God (426), writings that deal with the opposition between Christianity and the `world' and
represents the first Christian philosophy of history. He also wrote of the controversies with Manicheans,
Pelagians, and Donatists which helped lead to his ideas on Creation, Grace, the Sacraments and the
Church. There is a massive collection of his writings and they also include: Soliloquies (386-387), On Grace
and Free Will. (426) Retractions (426-427) and Letters (386-430).

Philosophical view

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.

Augustine’s view of the human person reflects the entire spirit of the medieval world when it
comes to man. Following the ancient view of Plato and infusing it with the newfound doctrine of
Christianity, Augustine agreed that man is of a bifurcated nature. An aspect of man dwells in the world
and is imperfect and continuously yearns to be with the Divine and the other is capable of reaching
immortality.

The body is bound to die on earth and the soul is to anticipate living eternally in a realm of spiritual
bliss in communion with God. This is because the body can only thrive in the imperfect, physical reality
that is the world, whereas the soul can also stay after death in an eternal realm with the all-transcendent
God. The goal of every human person is to attain this communion and bliss with the Divine by living his
life on earth in virtue.
 Immanuel Kant

Biography

Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724, in Konigsberg,

Prussia, or what is now Kaliningrad, Russia. While tutoring, he
published science papers, including "General Natural History and
Theory of the Heavens" in 1755. He spent the next 15 years as a
metaphysics lecturer. In 1781, he published the first part of
Critique of Pure Reason. He published more critiques in the years
preceding his death on February 12, 1804, in the city of his birth.

Immanuel Kant was the fourth of nine children born to

Johann Georg Cant, a harness maker, and Anna Regina Cant. Later
in his life, Immanuel changed the spelling of his name to Kantto to
adhere to German spelling practices. Both parents were devout
followers of Pietism, an 18th-century branch of the Lutheran Church. Seeing the potential in the young
man, a local pastor arranged for the young Kant's education. While at school, Kant gained a deep
appreciation for the Latin classics.

In 1740, Kant enrolled at the University of Konigsberg as a theology student but was soon
attracted to mathematics and physics. In 1746, his father died, and he was forced to leave the university
to help his family. For a decade, he worked as a private tutor for the wealthy. During this time, he
published several papers dealing with scientific questions exploring the middle ground between
rationalism and empiricism.

In 1755, Immanuel Kant returned to the University of Konigsberg to continue his education. That
same year he received his doctorate of philosophy. For the next 15 years, he worked as a lecturer and
tutor and wrote major works on philosophy. In 1770, he became a full professor at the University of
Konigsberg, teaching metaphysics and logic.

In 1781, Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason, an enormous work and one of the
most important on Western thought. He attempted to explain how reason and experiences interact with
thought and understanding. This revolutionary proposal explained how an individual’s mind organizes
experiences into understanding the way the world works.

Kant focused on ethics, the philosophical study of moral actions. He proposed a moral law called
the “categorical imperative,” stating that morality is derived from rationality and all moral judgments are
rationally supported. What is right is right and what is wrong is wrong; there is no grey area. Human beings
are obligated to follow this imperative unconditionally if they are to claim to be moral.

Though the Critique of Pure Reason received little attention at the time, Kant continued to refine
his theories in a series of essays that comprised the Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgement.
Kant continued to write on philosophy until shortly before his death. In his last years, he became
embittered due to his loss of memory. He died in 1804 at age 80.
Philosophical view

The philosophy of Immanuel Kant can be divided into two major branches. His theoretical
philosophy, which includes metaphysics, is based on the rational understanding of the concept of nature.
The second, his practical philosophy, comprising ethics and political philosophy, is based on the concept
of freedom. Both of these branches have been enormously influential in the subsequent history of
philosophy.

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. The inner self is
comprised of our psychological state and our rational intellect. The outer self includes our sense and the
physical world.

Thinking of the “self” as a mere combination of impressions was problematic for Immanuel Kant,
Kant recognizes the veracity of Hume’s account that everything starts with perception and sensation of
impressions. However, Kant thinks that the things that men perceive around them are not just randomly
infused into the human person without an organizing principle that regulates the relationship of all these
impressions. To Kant, there is necessarily a mind that organizes the impressions that men get from the
external world. Time and space, for example, are ideas that one cannot find in the world, but is built in
our minds. Kant calls these the apparatuses of the mind.

Along with the different apparatuses of the mind goes the “self.” Without the self, one cannot
organize the different impressions that one gets in relation to his own existence. Kant therefore suggests
that it is an actively engaged intelligence in man that synthesizes all knowledge and experience. Thus, the
self is not just what gives one his personality. In addition, it is also the seat of knowledge acquisition for
all human persons.
 Paul Churchland

Biography

Paul Churchland is a Canadian philosopher and

author. He is currently the Emeritus Professor of
Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. His
research focuses on epistemology, perception, philosophy
of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of
neuroscience, and philosophy of science.

He attended the University of British Columbia,

from where he received a degree in Bachelor of Arts in
1964. Later, he the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, and received a Ph.D. in 1969. With
American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars as his advisor, his
dissertation during the Ph.D. was "Persons and P-Predicates."

While working towards his Ph.D., Churchland taught philosophy at the University of Toronto from
1967–1969. After receiving the degree in 1969, he began teaching at the University of Manitoba in
Manitoba, Canada, as Assistant Professor. In 1974, he was promoted to Associate Professor and in 1979,
he became a full professor. After working with the University of Toronto for fifteen years, in 1984, he
accepted the "Valtz Family Endowed Chair" in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego,
California (UCSD,) within the Institute for Neural Computation and its Cognitive Science Faculty. He has
since been working with UCSD.

He remained on the Valtz Family Endowed Chair in Philosophy through 2011. In the years 1986-
1990, he also served as Department Chair at the university.

In February 2017, Churchland became a Professor Emeritus at UCSD and also a member of the
Board of Trustees of the Center for Consciousness Studies of the Philosophy Department, Moscow State
University. He continues to appear as a philosophy faculty member on the UCSD Interdisciplinary Ph.D.
Program in Cognitive Science and with the affiliated faculty of the UCSD Institute for Neural Computation.

Churchland cites as his influence the works of American philosophers, W. V. O. Quine, Thomas
Kuhn, Russell Hanson, Wilfred Sellars, and Austrian-American philosopher, Paul Feyerabend. His areas of
interest are epistemology, perception, philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of
neuroscience, and philosophy of science. He has authored numerous books on philosophy, including,
Matter and Consciousness, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, and Neurophilosophy at Work.

Churcland is a major proponent of eliminative materialism –– the view that because the mind and
brain are identical, we should eliminate the folk-psychological language (i.e., "mind" talk) from our
vocabulary and replace it with a new scientific/neurophysiological language. He introduced the concept
of "eliminative materialism" in his 1979 book, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. He further
refined the idea in is 1981 paper Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes, at the University
of Manitoba.
 He, and his wife, Patricia Churchland, also a philosopher, believe that the "folk psychology" that
seeks to explain human behavior in terms of the beliefs and desires of agents is flawed, and that it will be
eventually displaced by completed neuroscience –– a theory that is more substantially integrated within
physical science generally.

He proposes that beliefs are not ontologically real; that is, he maintains that a future, fully
matured neuroscience is likely to have no need for "beliefs", in the same manner that modern science
discarded such notions as legends or witchcraft. He believes that such concepts will be strictly eliminated
as wholly lacking in correspondence to precise objective phenomena, such as activation patterns across
neural networks. He notes that the history of science has seen many posits once considered real entities,
such as phlogiston, caloric, the luminiferous ether, and vital forces, thus eliminated.

In his 1996 book, The Engine of Reason, Churchland hypothesizes that consciousness might be
explained in terms of a recurrent neural network with its hub in the intralaminar nucleus of the thalamus,
and feedback connections to all parts of the cortex. He acknowledges that this proposal will likely be found
in error with regard to the neurological details but states his belief that it is on the right track in its use of
recurrent neural networks to account for consciousness. This has been described, notably, as a
reductionist rather than eliminativist account of consciousness.

In the book Matter and Consciousness, Churchland presents a contemporary overview of the
philosophical issues surrounding the mind and explains the main theories and philosophical positions that
have been proposed to solve them. He introduces the relevance of theoretical and experimental results
in neuroscience and cognitive science and reviews current developments in the cognitive sciences and
offers a clear and accessible account of the connections to the philosophy of mind.

In Plato's Camera, Churchland talks about how the brain constructs a representation of the
universe's timeless categorical and dynamical structure. This process of "taking a picture", which begins
at birth, yields the enduring background conceptual framework with which we interpret our sensory
experience for the rest of our lives.

Philosophical view

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.

Churchland and his wife are best known for what is called eliminative materialism. They are not
the originators of this theory but are among its most enthusiastic advocates. It is roughly the idea that
there are actually no mental states, no beliefs, desires, feelings. What we call mental states are actually
nothing but physical states. This is not the same as reductive materialism, on which we might say that for
example mental states are the same as physical states (the identity theory), that is, they are also physical
states, or can be explained by physical states (reductionism). To say that water is H2O is not to say there
isn’t any water, but what water is. To say that genetics can be explained by molecular biology isn’t to say
that there’s nothing to be explained but to say how it is to be explained.

Eliminative materialism holds that there is nothing mental states are identical to because they
don’t exist, and there is nothing to be explained, or rather, what is to be explained is human behavior, not
the mental states that supposedly explain human behavior. Human behavior is to be explained by state
of the brain using theories in ways that don’t map on at all to mental state talk.

To put it in a somewhat different way, mental states are part of a folk psychological theory of
human behavior which imputes our conduct to things like beliefs and desires which are mental, but a
scientific explanation of our behavior will not use those terms, but instead will refer to the sort of terms
used in brain science and cognitive psychology, and will offer explanations that do not track explanation
of behavior in terms of belief, desire, and the like.

References:

https://study.com/academy/lesson/immanuel-kants-metaphysics-of-the-self.html

https://www.biography.com › scholar › immanuel-kant

http://www.online-literature.com/saint-augustine/

https://www.britannica.com › biography › Saint-Augustine

https://peoplepill.com/people/paul-churchland/

https://www.quora.com/What-is-Paul-Churchlands-contribution-to-philosophy-of-mind