Lesson 1: From the Perspective of Philosophy
GREEK PHILOSOPHERS IN MILETUS
> They chose to seek natural explanations to events and phenomena
around them instead of seeking for supernatural explanations from the
gods that were passed down through generations.
APPROXIMATELY 600 BCE
● The Birth of Philosophy or the “love for wisdom", in Athens of
Ancient Greece.
● The Greeks in search of knowledge came up with answers that
are both cognitive and scientific in nature. (Price, 2000)
For instance…
● These philosophers observed changes in the world and wanted to
explain these changes by understanding the laws of nature.
● Their study of change led them to the “idea of permanence”
(Price, 2000)
"The early philosophers sought to understand the nature of human
beings, problems of morality and life philosophies"
The Philosophy of the Self
The Self has been defined as “as a unified being, essentially connected
to consciousness, awareness, and agency (or, at least, with the faculty of
rational choice) “. Different philosophers have come up with more specific
characteristics of the Self, and over time, these meanings have transformed
from pure abstractions to explanations that hold scientific evidence.
In The 5th Century BCE…
● Athenians settle arguments by discussion and debate
● People skilled in doing this were called Sophists, the first teachers of the
West.
SOCRATES
470-399 BCE
● The mentor of Plato
● Wanted to discover the essential nature of knowledge, justice, beauty
and goodness (moore andBruder, 2002)
● He didn't write anything, he is not a writer
● A lot of his thoughts were only known through Plato’ s writing (The
Dialogues)
SOCRATIC METHOD
This is Socrates’ method for discovering what is essential in the world
and in people
● In this method, Socrates did not lecture, he instead would ask questions
and engage the person in a discussion
● He would begin by acting as if he did not know anything and would get
the other person to clarify their ideas and resolve logical
inconsistencies (Price, 2000)
● Using this method, the questioner should be skilled at detecting
misconceptions and at revealing them by asking the right questions.
● His Socratic method allowed him to question people’ s beliefs and
ideas, exposing their misconceptions and get them to touch their souls
The goal is t o bring the person closer t o the final understanding
The unexamined life is not worth living. – Socrates
VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
● Socrates believed that the real self is not the physical body, but rather
the psyche (or soul). He further posited that the appearance of the
body is inferior to its functions.
● Socrates believed that his mission in life was to seek the highest
knowledge and convince others who are willing to seek his knowledge
with him
● He wanted to discover the essential nature of knowledge, justice,
beauty and goodness ( moore andBruder, 2002)
Be true to your own self. – Socrates
> According to Socrates, real understanding comes from within the person
> His Socratic method forces people to use their innate reason by reaching
inside themselves to their deepest nature
TRUE SELF
- The touching of the soul, may mean helping the person to get in touch
with his true self
- The true self, Socrates said, is not the body but the soul. Virtue is inner
goodness, and real beauty is that of the soul (Price, 2000)
The aim of the Socratic method is to make people think, seek and ask again
and again. Some may be angered and frustrated, but what is important is for
them to realize that they do not know everything, that there are things that
they are ignorant of, to accept this and to continue learning and searching for
answers(moore & Bruder, 2002)
GOOD AND EVIL
GOOD
● Wealth, status, pleasure, social acceptance are the thing we
considered the greatest good in life;
EVIL
● “All human beings strive for happiness, for happiness is the final
end in life. Everything we do because we think it will make us
happy. Therefore, we follow the label that what will bring us
happiness is good and what will bring us suffering and pain is
evil”
VIRTUE
● One supreme good, ultimate good and moral excellence
● Virtue – “ a virtuous person is one whose character is made up of the
moral qualities accepted as virtues include courage, justice, prudence,
and temperance.
● Virtue is greatest good in life, for it can alone secure happiness
● It is most important of the state of soul
HAPPINESS
Knowledge=virtues=happiness
● “ human being naturally desires good as it alone secure happiness, with
that knowledge they have no choice but to be virtuous"
● When we arrive at the knowledge of virtue we would become virtuous
and we will make our soul good and beautiful and when we perfect our
soul we will attain true happiness.
"Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they
have to say something"
-Plato-
PLATO
428 – 348 BCE
● His real name is Aristocles
● He was nicknamed “ Plato” because of his physical built which means
wide/broad
● LeftAthensfor12 years after the death of Socrates
● When he returned he established a school known as “The Academy”
THEORY OF FORMS
● Plato’s metaphysics (philosophical study on the causes and nature of
things)
● Plato explained that Forms refers to what are real
● They are not objects encountered with the senses but can only be
grasped intellectually
1. The Forms are ageless and therefore eternal
2. The Forms are unchanging and therefore permanent
3. The Forms are unmoving and indivisible
● Plato explained that forms refers to what are real and they are not
objects that can be seen but can only be grasped intellectually.
PLATO'S DUALISM
THE REALM OF SHADOWS
● Composed of changing, ‘sensible’ things which are lesser entities
and therefore imperfect and flawed
● Composed of eternal things which are permanent and perfect. It
is the source of all reality and true knowledge
VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
HE BELIEVED THAT KNOWLEDGE LIES WITHIN THE PERSON'S SOUL
● He considered human beings as microcosms of the universal
macrocosms i.e. everything in the universe can also be found on
people – earth, air, fire, water, mind and spirit (Price, 2000)
PLATO'S VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
● Think more and Know Yourself
● Give ourselves a time to think about our lives and how to lead them.
● Strengthen your self knowledge you don’t get yourself easily pulled
around by feelings by subjecting your ideas to examination rather
acting on impulse.
● According to people we just go along with “doxa” which means popular
opinion.
● In honor of his mentor he called to process of examination “ Socratic
Discussion”
SOUL
PLATO DESCRIBED THE SOUL AS HAVING THE THREE COMPONENTS:
1. The Reason is rational and is the motivation for goodness and
truth.
2. The Spirited is non- rational and is the will or the drive toward
action
3. The Appetites are irrational and lean towards the desire for
pleasures of the body
Plato believed that people are intrinsically good. Sometimes however,
judgements are made in ignorance and Plato equates ignorance with evil.
(Price, 2000)
THEORY OF LOVE AND BECOMING
ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE
● What people see are only shadows of reality which they believe
are real things and represents knowledge
● What these people fail to realize is that the shadows are not real
for according to Plato, “only the Forms are real”
ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE
● The most famous allegory in philosophy.
● The story was intended to compare “ the effect of education and lack of
it on our nature”
● The story of the cave is an allegory of the life of enlightened people.
● For plato we are most of our lives in shadow, many of the things we get
excited about like fame, perfect partner, high status job are infinitely
less real that we suppose they are for the most are phantoms projected
by our culture.
"For love is the desire of the whole, and the pursuit of the whole is called love."
PLATO'S LOVE
● Plato’ s love begins with a feeling or experience that there is something
lacking
● This then drives the person to seek for that which is lacking
● Thoughts and efforts are then directed towards the pursuit of which is
lacking
● The person you need to get together with should have good qualities
which you yourself lack.
● By getting close to this person you become a little like there are
● For Plato, in a good relationship, a couple should not love each other
exactly as they are right now rather they should be committed to
educating each other to be the best version of themselves
The deeper the thought, the stronger is the love.
Love is a process of seeking higher stages of being, The GREATER the love, the
MORE intellectual component it will contain.
● Lifelong longing and pursuit seek even higher stages of love which lead
to the possession of absolute beauty (moore and Bruder, 2002)
Christian Philosophers…
● Their concern was with God and man's relationship with God
● These Christian philosophers did not believe that self-knowledge and
happiness were the ultimate goals of man
Greek Philosophers
● Sees man as basically good and becomes evil through ignorance of
what is good
Christian Philosophers
● Sees man as sinners who reject/go against a loving God’ s commands
ST. AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
354-436 CE
● Hippo, Africa
● Became a priest and bishop of Hippo
● Initially rejected Christianity for it seemed to him then that
Christianity could not provide him answers to questions that
interested him
VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
1. GOD as the source of all reality and truth.
- Through a mystical experience, a man is capable of knowing the
eternal truths
● This is possible through the existence of one eternal truth
which is God
- God is within man and transcends him
2. The sinfulness of man
● The cause of sin or evil is an act of man’s freewill
● MORAL GOODNESS CAN BE ONLY ACHIEVED THROUGH THE GRACE OF
GOD
God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.
-Saint AugustineTHE ROLE OF LOVE
"For God is love and he created humans for them to also love"
● Disordered Love results when man loves the wrong things which
he believes will give him happiness
St. Augustine explains..
1. Love of physical objects leads to sin of greed
2. Love for other people is not lasting and excessive love for themis the sin
of jealousy
3. Love for the self leads to the sin of people
4. Love for God is the supreme virtue and only through loving God can
man find real happiness
St. Augustine explains..
● Thomas Aquinas maintains that a human is a single material
substance.
● He understands the soul as the form of the body, which makes a human
being the composite the two. Thus, only living, form-matter composites
can truly be called human; dead bodies are"human"only analogously.
● One actually existing substance comes from the body and soul. A
human is a single material substance, but still should be understood as
having an immaterial soul, which continues after bodily death
CORGITO
ERGO
SUM
RENE DESCARTES
1596- 1650
● Father of modern Philosophy
● One of the Rationalist Philosophers of Europe
● Cartesian method and Analytic Geometry
● He proposed method of doubts
DESCARTES'S VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
● Heobservedthatoursensesis deeply unreliable but could trust that he
was actually thinking.
● He argued that we do not need scientists and using expensive
equipment to prove something we just need “a quiet room and a
rational mind”.
● One of his clear thoughts he called a “clear and distinct idea” is that
God Exists.
● Skepticism refers to an attitude of doubt or disbelief, either in general or
toward a particular object, or to any doubting or questioning attitude or
state of mind.
VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
Descartes deduced that a thinker is a thing that doubts, understands,
affirms, denies, wills, refuses and also imagines and feels (Price, 2000)
DESCARTES' SYSTEM
Through math, he discovered that the human mind has TWO POWERS:
1. INTUITION or the ability to apprehend direction of certain truths.
2. DEDUCTION or the power to discover what is not known by
progressing in an orderly way from what is already known
“I think; therefore I am.” – Descartes
THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM
- The body, according to Descartes, is like a machine that is controlled by
the will and aided by the mind.
“What worries you, masters you” — John Locke
JOHN LOCKE
1632 - 1704
● Born in Wrington, England
● Interested in politics; Defender of the parliamentary system
● At Oxford, he studied medicine which would play a central role in
his life.
● At 57 years old, He published a book which played a significant
role in the era of Enlightenment (Price, 2000)
➢ He believed that knowledge results from ideas produced a
posteriori or objects that were experienced
The process involves 2 forms:
1. SENSATION where objects are experienced through senses
2. REFLECTION by which the mind 'looks' at the objects that
were experienced discover relationships that may exist
between them
➢ Locke contended that ideas are not innate but rather the mind at
birth is a “TABULA RASA” (i.e. BlankSlate)
LOCKE'S VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
● He believed that we are all born as tabula rasa (blankstate)
● He argued that all knowledge is obtained through experience; he
rejected the concept of Rene's ideas.
● Locke thought that “we’ are born knowing nothing and instead all of our
knowledge comes to us through sense data”
● Since there are no innate ideas according locke, morals, religious, and
political values must come from experience
"No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience." — JOHN LOCKE
VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
moral good depends on the conformity of a person’ s behavior towards
some law
THERE ARE 3 LAWS ACCORDING TO LOCKE:
1. LAW OF OPINION – where actions that are praiseworthy are called
VIRTUES and those are not are VICES
2. CIVIL LAW– where right actions are enforced by people in authority
3. DIVINE LAW– set by God on the actions of man
EMPIRICISM
● Belief in that sense– experience is the most reliable source of
knowledge.
● It emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory
perception, in the formation of ideas, and argues that the only
knowledge humans can have is a based on experience
“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.” — David Hume
DAVID HUME
1632 - 1704
● Born in Edinburgh, Scotland
● At the time he was enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, he lost
his faith
● He relied on the scientific method, believing that it could analyze
human nature and explain the workings of the mind
THE HUMAN MIND
According to Hume, there are two types of perceptions:
1. IMPRESSIONS immediate sensations of external reality
2. IDEAS recollections of the impressions
In examining the patterns of thinking, Hume formulated three principles on
how ideas relate to one another:
➢ THE PRINCIPLE OF RESEMBLANCE
➢ THE PRINCIPLE OF CONTIGUITY
➢ THE PRINCIPLE OF CAUSE AND EFFECT
HUME'S VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
● Hume’ s believed that we are more influenced by our feelings than by
reason.
● People are more motivated by our motivated feelings than any other
analysis and logic.
● Hume argued that the idea of the self doesn't persist over time. He said
there is no you that is the same person from birth to death. He said the
concept of the self is just an illusion
● Hume said that the so- called “ self ” is just a bundle of impressions,
consisting of a zillion different things – my body, my mind, emotions,
preferences, memories, even labels that are imposed on my by
others.The soul of the person is self
● It all begins with impressions, without impressions there will be no ideas.
In looking for ‘ the self' , Hume only discovered sense of impressions
● He believed that like causality, ‘ the self’ is also a product of
imagination
● There is no such thing as ‘personal identity’ behind perceptions
and feelings that come and go;
THERE IS NO PERMANENT/UNCHANGING SELF
“I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.”
— Immanuel Kant
IMMANUEL KANT
1724 - 1804
● Lived in the town of Konigsberg in East Prussia (presently Western
Russia)
● Founder of German Idealism
● Wrote three books:
1. Critique of Pure Reason
2. Critique of Practical reason
3. Critique of Judgement
VIEWS OF THE MIND
Kant argued that the mind is not just a passive receiver of sense
experience but rather actively participates in knowing the objects it
experiences.
VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE AND THE SELF
“When the self sees an object, it tends to remember its characteristics
and applies on it, the forms of time and space”
● The term he used for this experience of the self and its unity with
objects is TRANSCENDENTAL APPERCEPTION
● He concluded that all objects of knowledge, which includes the
self, are phenomenal
KANT'S VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
● Kant argued, in order to determine what's right, you have to use reason.
● He believed that we should not look to religion for morality because
morality is constant.
● He pointed out that, most of the time, whether or not we ought to do
something isn't really a moral choice,instead it's just contingent on our
desires
eg. If your desire is to get money, then you ought to get a job.
In the matter o f God, Kant stated that the Kingdom o f God is within man
● Godis manifestedinpeople's lives therefore it is man's duty to move
towards perfection
“The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.”
— Sigmund Freud
SIGMUND FREUD
1856- 1939
● Austrian Neurologists
● His psychodynamic theory has characteristics of philosophical
thought
● Freud made use of methods like free association and dream
analysis for his clinical practice
STRUCTURES OF THE MIND
In Freud's illustration, he made use of the typical iceberg to show how
the mind works based on his theorizing
The three levels of the mind are structured by the
following components:
ID – based on the pleasure principle
EGO – based on the reality principle
SUPER EGO – primarily dependent on learning the
difference between right or wrong
Freud in his 1920 book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he presented 2 kinds of
instincts that drive individual behavior:
EROS – Life Instinct; the energy is called LIBIDO and urges necessary for
individual and species survival like thirst, hunger and sex
THANATOS – Death Instinct; behavior that is directed towards
destruction in the form of aggression and violence
VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
“Man’s behavior by his pleasure seeking life instinct and his destructive
instinct is said to be born with his ego already in conflict”
● He sees man as a product of his past lodged within his
subconscious.
● Man then lives his life balancing the forces of life and death –
making mere existence challenge
“Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a
machine” – Gilbert Ryle
GILBERT RYLE
1900 - 1976
● English Philosopher
● Contradicted Cartesian Dualism
● Stated that many of the philosophical problems were caused by
the wrong use of language
● Book he made “The Concept of the mind”
VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE AND KNOWLEDGE
Ryle touched two types of knowledge:
1. KNOWING-THAT
- Refers to knowing facts/ information
2. KNOWING-HOW
- Using facts in the performance of some skill or technical
abilities
VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE AND KNOWLEDGE
● Ryle thought that free will was invented to answer the question of
whether an action deserves praise or blame.
● He assumes that “man's actions must be moral for it to be free”
“A person may acquire a great bulk of knowledge but without the ability to
use it to solve some practical problems to make his life easier, this bulk of
knowledge is deemed to be worthless” — GILBERT RYLE
“To understand the mind, we must understand the brain”
— Patricia Churchland
PATRICIA & PAUL CHURCHLAND
Patricia Churchland
● Born onJuly 16, 1943
Paul Churchland
● Born on October 21, 1942
Patricia coined the term NEUROPHILOSOPHY, who together with Paul was
dissatisfied with the particular approach of philosophers and instead sought
to guide scientific theorizing with philosophy and guide philosophy with
scientific inquiry
The philosophy of neuroscience is the study of the philosophy of the mind, the
philosophy of science, neuroscience, and psychology.
Aims to explore the relevance of the neuroscientific studies to the philosophy
of the mind
“There isn't a special thing called the mind. the mind is just the brain”
-Patricia ChurchlandPatricia claims that the man's brain is responsible for the identity known as
'the self'
● The biochemical properties of the brain according to this philosophy is
really responsible for man’s thoughts, feelings and behavior
VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
“Man is endowed with more than just physical or neurological
characteristics. Despite research findings, neurophilosophy states that
the self is real, that it is the tool that helps the person tune-in to the
realities of the brain and the extant reality”
“We know not through our intellect but through our experience.”
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
1908 - 1961
● French Phenomenological Philosopher
● ‘Philosopher of the Body’
● Center of his philosophy is the emphasis placed on the human
body as the primary site of knowing the world
● He focus on the relationship of self – experience and experience
of other through PERCEPTION
VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE
According tomerleau- Ponty, The world and the sense of self are
emergent phenomena in the ongoing process of man's ‘ becoming
In addition he stated that perception is not purely the result of
sensations nor is it purely interpretation. Rather, consciousness is a
process that includes sensing as well as interpreting/reasoning