PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN PERSON (2 ND QUARTER) 1
I.
FREEDOM
 Freedom is part of humanity’s authenticity, of our very nature and of our transcendence. a.
Aristotle – reason can legislate but only through the will can its legislation be translated into action. It should be noted though that without the intellect, there would be no will. b.
St. Thomas Aquinas – man, who is both body and spirit, is a moral agent wherein it is our spirituality that separates us from animals through our conscience. c.
Jean Paul Sartre – the human person is the desire to be God: the desire to exist as a being which has its sufficient ground in itself (en sui causa). There is no guidepost to a person’s life as the person builds/creates his/her own destiny. d.
Theory of Social Contract d.1. Thomas Hobbes – (Leviathan) law of nature is a precept or general rule established by reason, by which a person is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life or takes away the means of preserving it. Peace is the first law of nature, followed by the denial of our rights (except the right to self-defense/selfpreservation) so as to achieve peace. His views are more autocratic than Rousseau in that he believes that the powerful should be the ones who should handle the state. d.2. Jean Jacques Rousseau - (The Social Contract) also believed that human beings should form a community that will protect themselves from one another. However, his views are more democratic in the sense that he believes of the collective or common power conferred to one ruler that should govern the state.
II.
INTERSUBJECTIVITY
 Intersubjectivity – relatedness of humans towards others/being with others. One of its manifestations and the first critical component of this is accepting others and their differences. a.
Martin Buber – (Ich and Du/I and Thou) conceives the human person in his/her totality, wholeness, concrete experience and relatedness to the world. A human is a subject, who is a being different from things or from objects. The human person experiences his wholeness not in virtues of his relation to one’s self, but in virtue of his relation to another self through dialog. b.
Karol Jozef Wojtyla – (Fides et Ratio/Faith and Reason) action reveals the nature of the human agent.
Participation explains the essence of the human person as it is through this that we are oriented towards being in relation and sharing in the communal life for the common good. c.
On PWDS, the Underprivileged and Women
III.
SOCIETY
 Soren Kierkegaard – humans tend to conform to an image or idea associated with being a certain type of person reducing ourselves to mediocrity.
 Feudalism (Medieval) - it was a way of structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor.
 Naturalism (Modern) - a theory that relates scientific method to philosophy by affirming that all beings and events in the universe (whatever their inherent character may be) are natural. Consequently, all knowledge of the universe falls within the pale of scientific investigation. Although naturalism denies the existence of truly supernatural realities, it makes allowance for the supernatural, provided that knowledge of it can be had indirectly—that is, that natural objects be influenced by the so-called supernatural entities in a detectable way. a.
Rene Descartes – “Cogito ergo sum.” Author of Discourse on Method (1637). First, Descartes thought that the Scholastics’ method was prone to doubt given their reliance on sensation as the source for all knowledge.
Second, he wanted to replace their final causal model of scientific explanation with the more modern, mechanistic model.
 Empiricism (Modern) - the philosophy of knowledge by observation. It holds that the best way to gain knowledge is to see, hear, touch, or otherwise sense things directly. In stronger versions, it holds that this is the only kind of knowledge that really counts. Empiricism has been extremely important to the history of science, as various thinkers over the centuries have proposed that all knowledge should be tested empirically rather than just through thought-experiments or rational calculation. a.
John Locke - Locke's approach to empiricism involves the claim that all knowledge comes from experience and that there are no innate ideas that are with us when we are born. At birth we are a blank slate, or tabula rasa in Latin. Experience includes both sensation and reflection. b.
David Hume - Hume believes that knowledge not gained through experience is false and we must ignore it.
Humans cannot know anything for certain except that which we prove empirically. Experience provides us with both the ideas themselves and our awareness of their association. All human beliefs (including those we regard as cases of knowledge) result from repeated applications of these simple associations. c.
George Berkeley - was both an empiricist and an idealist. Empiricism involves the belief that what we know comes from sense experience, while idealism is the view that mind-independent things do not exist. ...
To Berkeley, 'To be is to be perceived', meaning that all that exists is our perception of things: mindindependent things do not exist.
Prepared by: TG CALZADO imbas

PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN PERSON (2 ND QUARTER) 2
 Critical Idealism (Modern) - Transcendental Idealism (or Critical Idealism) is the view that our experience of things is about how they appear to us (representations), not about those things as they are in and of themselves. a.
Immanuel Kant – humanity’s nature is the real creator of humanity’s world. It is not the external world, as such, that is the deepest truth for us at all; it is the inner structure of the human spirit that merely expresses itself in the visible nature about us. Thought to be the Father of Contemporary Thinking, Kant greatly influenced Western thought.
 Globalization and Technological Innovations
IV.
DEATH
 Meaning of One’s Life a.
Socrates – believes that knowing thyself is a condition to solve the present problem. For him, a virtuous life leads to happiness. b.
Plato – contemplation or the communion of the mind with the universal and eternal ideas is the only available means for a mortal human being to free himself from his space-time confinement to ascend to the heaven of ideas and there commune with the immortal, eternal, the infinite and the divine truths. c.
Aristotle – everything in nature seeks to realize itself – to develop its potentialities and finally realize its actualities (entelechy: to become its essence). Nothing happens by chance. Striving to realize themselves, objects and human beings move toward their origin and perfection. Our highest faculty is reason which finds its perfection in contemplating the Unmoved Mover. d.
Friedrich Nietzsche – realizing one’s higher self means fulfilling one’s loftiest vision, noblest ideal. On his way to the goal of self-fulfillment, man will encounter difficulties. The individual has to liberate himself from environmental influences that are false to one’s essential beings, for the “unfree man” is “a disgrace to nature.” e.
Arthur Schopenhauer – utilized Kant’s ideas of the noumenon (the thing in itself) and phenomenon (the experienced). Though unlike Kant, the phenomenal world for him is a world of illusion and that we can know the noumenal through the Will. f.
Martin Heidegger – human existence is exhibited in care. Care is understood in terms of finite temporality, which reaches with death. He claims that only by living through the nothingness of death in anticipation do one attain authentic existence. g.
Jean-Paul Sartre – human person desires to be God. h.
Karl Jaspers – stressed the importance of the imminent (limited to what man actually does and knows) and transcendent (the limitless). The imminent includes: Dasein (objects of ordinary experience); Consciousness in general (manifested in scientific/objective knowledge) and Spirit (historic unities or as members of a totality).
The transcendent includes: Existenz (limitless possibility unique to individuals as primordial ground of the self) and Transcendence (goes beyond the natural world; it is being itself and a ground for Existenz). i.
Gabriel Marcel – made distinction that applies to a number of areas in life, including the experience of human embodiment, the nature of intersubjective relations, and the nature of the human person.
 Stephen Cave: The 4 stories we tell ourselves about death
 The void.
 The stairs/elevator.
 Philosophy: Death is naught. How can someone prove that death is if he/she is not? Can naught speak of something naught?
BIAS/COMFORT:
 Elixir: The quest for eternal youth
 Resurrection: The rise from death
 Soul: Eternal after death
 Legacy: Unforgotten (Plant a book, bear a tree, write a child)
Will it matter if you are remembered by many or not? Will it kill you twice if you don’t have a thousand friends, a million likes, a billion followers or your name is whispered on all parts of the galaxy or the universe?
What really matters is that you matter to those who matter to you.
It is not too late to live a happy life.
It is not too late to cuddle your cat or dog.
It is not too late to embrace your mom/dad and tell them you love them.
It is not too late to forgive brother/sister/those that wronged you.
It is not too late to LIVE even if you only have an hour if that would be the case.
Seize your day! Own it! LIVE IT! CARPE DIEM.
Prepared by: TG CALZADO imbas

PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN PERSON (2 ND QUARTER) 3
Prepared by: TG CALZADO imbas

PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN PERSON (2 ND QUARTER) 4
Prepared by: TG CALZADO imbas