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Philosophical views of the self

 Socrates
 Plato
 Augustine of Hippo
 Rene Descartes
 John Locke
 David Hume
 Immanuel Kant
 Sigmund Freud
 Gilbert Ryle
 Paul Churchland
 Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Know Thyself?
The concept of the “self” has been an
ongoing and evolving, subject of inquiry
among philosophers since the time of
Socrates. To grapple with the concept of
the self is to begin to explore what it is to
know, to believe, to think, to be conscious.
Know Thyself?
Who exactly is your “self”? What are the
qualifications that define it? What
differentiates your particular “self” from all
others? What is the relation of your “self”
to your “body”? How does your “self”
relate to the other “selves”? What happens
to a “self” when the body dies? In what
ways is it possible for your to “know” your
“self”? In what ways you might never fully
know your “self?
The Soul is Immortal: Socrates and
Plato
 For Socrates and Plato, the self was
synonymous with the soul. Every
human being, the believed, possessed
an immortal soul that survived the
physical body.
 Dualistic view of the self: Material
substance ( physical body) and
immaterial substance ( mind or soul)
are two separate aspects of the self.
The Soul is Immortal: Socrates and
Plato
 Plato further defines the soul or self as
having three components: Reason, Physical
appetite and Spirit (passion). These three
components may work in concert or in
opposition.
Reason – our divine essence that enables us to
think deeply, make wise choices, and achieve a
true understanding of eternal truths.
Physical appetite – basic biological need such
as hunger, thirst, and sexual desire
Spirit or Passion – basic emotions such as love,
anger, ambition, aggressiveness, empathy
 The Chariot analogy
St. Agustine’s Synthesis of Plato and
Christianity
 The existence of an immaterial reality
separate from the physical world
 The radical distinction between an
immaterial soul and physical body
 The existence of an immortal soul that
finds its ultimate fulfillment in union with
the eternal, transcendent realm
 He considers the body a “slave” to the soul,
and their relations as contentious, BUT
ultimately came to view the body as the
“spouse” of the soul, with both attached to
one another by a “natural appetite”
Descartes’ Modern Perspective of
the Self
 The self is a thinking thing distinct from
the body
 Descartes theory of knowledge: Cogito,
ergo sum (I think therefore, I am)
- the essence of existing as a human
identity is the possibility of being aware of
ourselves, thus, having self identity and
being self-conscious are mutually
dependent on one another.
Descartes’ Modern Perspective of
the Self
 The self as a thinking entity and your self
as a physical body are quiet distinct
Physical body: a material, mortal, nonthinking
entity fully governed by physical laws of
nature
Thinking self or soul: non material, immortal,
conscious being, independent of the laws of
the universe.
 Our reasoning ability provides the origin of
knowledge and final court of judgment in
evaluating the accuracy and value of the
ideas produced
The Self is consciousness: Locke
 All knowledge originates from our sense
experience, which acts as the final court
of judgment in evaluating the accuracy
and value of ideas
“on Personal Identity”
Points:
1. To discover the nature of personal
identity, we’re going to have to find out
what is means to be person
The Self is consciousness: Locke
Points:
2. A person is a thinking being who has the
abilities to reason and to reflect.
3. A person is someone who considers itself to
be the same thing in different times and
places
4. Consciousness –being aware that we are
thinking- always accompanies thinking and is
an essential part of the thinking process
5. Consciousness is what makes possible our
belief that we are the same identity in
different times and different places.
The Self is consciousness: Locke
 The essence of the self is its conscious
awareness of itself as a thinking,
reasoning, reflecting identity.
 The self is not tied to any particular
body or substance, and it only exists in
other times and places because of our
memory of those experiences
There is no self: Hume
 The self is a “bundle or collection of
different perceptions, which succeed each
other with an inconceivable rapidity and
are in a perpetual flux and movement”
 Humans so desperately want to believe
that they have a unified and continuous
self or soul that they use their imaginations
to construct a fictional self.
 Mind is a theater , a container for fleeting
sensations and disconnected ideas and our
reasoning ability is merely a slave to the
passions”
We construct the Self: Kant
 Against the idea of Hume that genuine
knowledge and self do not exist.
 Self is “transcendental” status: it exists
independently of experience. The self is
product of reason because the self
regulates experience by making unified
experience possible.
The self is multilayered: Freud
 The self is multi layered consisting of the
conscious, pre conscious and unconscious
– not absolute or permanent
1. Unconscious self - has the dominant
influence in our personalities
-contains basic instinctual drives that seeks
immediate gratification (e.g. sexuality,
aggressiveness, traumatic memories, etc.)
characterized by the most primitive level of
human motivation
-the naked impulses are governed by the
“pleasure principle”
The self is multilayered: Freud
2. Conscious self – behavior and
experience are organized in ways that are
rational, practical and appropriate to the
social environment
- Governed by the “reality principle”
- Controls the constant pressures of the
unconscious self
The self is multilayered: Freud
 Two models of the Mind:
1. Topographical
- conscious
- pre conscious
- Unconscious
2. Structural
a. ID
b. Ego
c. Super ego
The self is how you behave: Ryle
 Debunked the myth of dualism
 “ghost in the machine” – the self is
thought be be a spiritual, immaterial
(ghost rattling around the physical
body) conflicts directly with our
everyday experience revealing it self to
be conceptually flawed and confused
notion that needs to be revised.
The self is how you behave: Ryle
 How do we know other minds?
- For Ryle, our knowledge of other
person’s mind can only be inferential at
best.
- Although we can observe the bodies ad
actions of others, we can only make
inferences regarding the mind that is
producing these actions.
The self is how you behave: Ryle
 Category mistake - the mind is a
concept that expresses the entire
system of thoughts, emotions and
actions.
- Happens when we think of the self as
existing apart from certain observable
behaviors, a purely mental entity
existing in time but not space
- The self does not really exist! (against
Cartesian dualism)
The self is how you behave: Ryle
 Focused his attention on human
behavior, thus self, is a pattern of
behavior, the tendency or disposition
for a person to behave in a certain way
in certain circumstances.
The self is the brain : Churchland
 To fully understand the nature of the mind,
we have to fully understand the nature of
the brain
 Eliminative materialism - It is a radical
claim that our ordinary common sense
understanding of the mind is wrong and
that some or all of the mental states
posited by common sense do not actually
exists.
 “The brain is the self” - It reduces
everything into the function of the brain,
thus, there is no self, freedom or
immortality
The self is embodied subjectivity:
Merleau-Ponty
 The body is the seat of perception which
essentially implies the structural interconnection
between subjective consciousness and its object
 Everything that we are aware of and can possible
know is contained within our own consciousness
 It is our consciousness that is primary and the
space/time world that is secondary, existing
fundamentally as the object to our consciousness.
- It is a dimension of our lived body, which is not an
object of the world, distinct from the knowing self, but
it is the subjects’ own points of view on the world. The
body is itself the original knowing subject which all
other forms of knowledge derive.
What is the SELF?

Why is it important to
have a philosophy of the
self?

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