Bs Psychology - Understanding Philosophers

Mary Christilla Presbitero                                                                July 3, 2018

Understanding the Self                                                                        BS Psychology 1

• Socrates

• Socrates believed that one should know thyself because one philosopher once said that “mastering others is strength, while mastering yourself is true power” which means that by gaining the true power is by knowing oneself. He believed that man is composed of body and soul which is the body is the imperfect, impermanent while the soul is the perfect and permanent of human.  

• Plato

• Plato believed that the self is composed of mind and body. He was also convinced that we are not self- sufficient that we need others to learn and that soul is the core essence of the living being but argued that it has a distinct existence.

• St. Agustine

• St. Agustine believed that man is bifurcated Nature. He argues about the possibility of knowledge that humans are responsible of their own doings, from what is good and evil and he even questioned that why man chooses to do evil instead of doing the right/good thing.

• Thomas Aquinas

• He believed that man is composed of matter and form. That he believes that soul is what animates our body that makes us human. Thomas Aquinas believes that all our self-knowledge is dependent on our experience of the world around us.

• Rene Descartes

• He believed that there is so much that we should doubt but one must not doubt the existence of the self and nothing else. He believed that the mind is what controls the body is all an extension of the mind that body is nothing else but a machine that is attached to the brain.

• David Hume

• He believed that self is not an entity over and beyond our physical body that one can only attain knowledge is by experiencing. He believed that self is nothing more but a bundle of impression and that first is what we experience if real life and second is what we thought about things.

• Immanuel Kant

• He believed that self is related to the spiritual realm that self is not in the body. He believed that the body is the outer sense and the soul is the inner sense in which the inner is where we think rationally and the outer includes our senses that we experience in real life and that our reasons affect our morality.

• Guilbert Ryle

• He believed that the behavior that a person exhibits in his day to day life. He believed that the mind is distinct from the body, where he further explains that there is no hidden identity or the so called soul which is also understood as mind or self. The mental acts are distinct from physical acts the mind and body are not isolated.

• Maurice- Merleau Ponty

• He believed that self is embodied subjectivity, that the mind and body works together which means that the self is influenced by the personal feelings, tastes, or opinions that the body acts what the mind want it to do or in other words his body and thoughts are one.

• Sigmund Freud

• He believed

• Paul Churchland

• He believed that nothing by matter exist where he stands on a materialistic view. Anything that can be feel, heard, seen, tasted, or touched does exists because he believed that the things that we don’t feel on our senses does not exist like our common sense which we don’t feel, touch, taste, see, or even heard.

Point of View about Self

• For me the self is truly composed of body and soul in where the body serves as our physical appearance and the soul’s serves as our inner appearance we may not see our inner appearance but this is what makes as human it serves as a purpose for us. The mind is also part of our self because this helps us with the way we think, the way we decide whether what’s moral and immoral and that we also need one another to develop ourselves by our experiences from other people in which we all learn from our experiences. I also believe that the mind and body do really work together because the mind really affects the physical body like thinking negative thoughts will make you undecided and confused where your body also responses to what you think and may show confusion in the real world.