Who Is The Human

Person?
Module 5
“ A man, a woman, or child of the
species homo sapiens, distinguished
from other animals by superior mental
development, power of articulate
speech, and upright stance”
-Oxford Dictionary
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO STUDY THE
NATURE OF HUMAN PESRON?
You need to discover who you are,
what are you capable of, or what you
become.
A human nature has 3 aspects
Somatic aspect
-Refers to the body, material composition, or
substance of a human person.
Behavioral aspect
-Refers to the human person’s mode of acting.
B.F. Skinner stated that any condition or event that
may be shown to take effect on behaviour must
be taken into account.
Attitudinal aspect
-Refers to the human person’s inclinations,
feelings, ideas, convictions, and prejudice or
biases.
THEORIES ON HUMAN NATURE
HUMAN PERSON AS AN IMMORTAL SOUL

“Every soul is immortal, for that which moves itself is

immortal, while what moves, and is moved by
something else stops living when it stops moving… this is
the very essence and principlenof a soul , for every
bodily object that is moved from outside has no soul,
while a body whose motion comes from whithin, from
itself does have a soul”
-Pheaudus
One of the famous dialogues of plato
The soul is deemed immortal. This
implies that the soul, since it is the
source of movement, is something that
is, in itself, necessarily uncreated and
immortal because if the soul itself
created, then it could not have been
the source of movement.
HUMAN PERSON AS A COMPOSITE OF
BODY AND SOUL
Arisrotle, another leading philosopher in the
analysis of human person explained in his work De
Anima (1968) all the capacities possessed by all
living things.
Although thus work is generally called
Aristotle’s psychology, it involves the relation
between psyche (or soul) and the body.
 Aristotle distinguished the three kinds of
substance:
Matter
Shape or form
Composite of form and matter
HUMAN PERSON AS A “THINKING
THING”

On the hand I have a clear and distinct idea of

myself, in so far as I am simply a thinking, non-
extend thing [that is, a mind], and on the other
hand I have a distinct idea of body, in so far as this
is simply an extend, non thinking thing. And
accordingly, it is certain that I am really distinct
from my body, and can exist without it.

-Rene Descartes
For Rene Descartes, human nature is
characterized only b the immaterial
thing called mind.
 The necessary and sufficient condition for a knowing
consciousness to be knowledgable of its object is that it
be consciousnesswere not consciousness of being
consciousness of the table, ot would then be
consciousnessof that table without consciousness of
being so. In other words, it would be a consciousness
ignorant of itself, an unconscious which os absurd. This is
a sufficient condition, for my being conscious of being
conscious of that table suffices in fact for me to be
conscious of it
- Jean Paul Satre, Being Nothingness
Two types of being emerged:

The being-in-itself

The being-for-itself
HUMAN NATURE AS FREEDOM

Freedom is not wanting to do things

but the being-for-itself acying upon
autonomous choices
 You make your own choice and you
take responsibility for your choice.
Blaming others is not possibility for a
human whose actions were guided by
his or her freedom.