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    Self As Unity

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    halle ayden
    study about philosophy

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    Self As Unity

    Uploaded by

    halle ayden
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    study about philosophy

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    Self as Unity

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    study about philosophy

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    4 views13 pages

    Self As Unity

    Uploaded by

    halle ayden
    study about philosophy

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 13

    PHILOSOPHY

    Unit #4 Human person


    as unity
    Unit #4 Human person as unity

    At the heart of
    philosophizing about the
    human person is the desire
    and the attempt to answer
    the question “Who am I?”.
    Philosophy in our world

    There’s an old saying that


    goes: Tell me who
    your friends are, and I’ll tell
    you who you are.
    Lesson 1: “I think, therefore, I am”

    One can hardly answer the question


    “Who am I?” without going through
    some sort of introspection. The very
    act of thinking is in itself the beginning
    of knowing oneself.
    As lovers of wisdom,
    philosophers value nothing
    more than knowing the truth. It
    is this premium placed not just
    on any sort of knowledge, but
    on true knowledge that makes
    philosophy so rigorous—for
    there are many things that we
    can know, but not everything is
    true.
    However, is not the time to dive into politics or in
    any sort of pressing issues. Rather, our goal here
    is to know more about ourselves, and that alone is
    difficult enough. It is hard to pinpoint any single
    characteristic or quality that could fully describe
    who you are. But before you even attempt to do
    so, it is important to consider if these things are
    actually true, if they’re really reflective of who you
    are. Can I really call myself pretty? Handsome?
    Am I really as smart and clever as I think I am?
    Are the things I believe in actually true?
    René Descartes

    The seventeenth century


    French philosopher.

    Known as the Father of


    Modern Philosophy.
    Like many of us, Descartes, as he grew up, realized that
    many of the things he held to be true in the past were, in
    fact, false.
    Descartes was disturbed by similar revelations and, he
    wondered, if there were other things he believed in that
    actually turned out to be wrong or faulty. And so, he began
    this process of skepticism or doubt, known philosophically
    as Cartesian doubt, whereby he systematically and
    methodically disbelieved everything until he could get at a
    point of which there was absolutely no doubt. In effect,
    Descartes set out to examine his beliefs carefully. He did so
    one by one, only accepting the beliefs that he couldn’t doubt
    to be true.
    If our senses failed us in the past, then, for
    Descartes, it becomes much harder to trust
    them. This is what he coined as the Causal
    Theory. How are we to know that they are telling
    us the truth? He goes one step further in his
    process of methodic doubt and proposes the
    idea that everything we know, everything we
    perceive with our senses, could all really be just
    an illusion created by some sort of evil genius.
    Descartes suggested that everything we know about
    the world and about ourselves is really just the creation
    of this evil genius, whose purpose is to deceive us, as if
    we were in a dream.

    Despite the situation, Descartes doesn’t despair. He arrives at his aha!


    or eureka moment: He could be deceived by his senses and by an evil
    genius, but he could not doubt the fact that he was doubting. It was
    with this realization that he gave philosophy one of its most famous
    lines: Cogito, ergo sum or I think, therefore, I am. He could doubt and
    deny the existence of everything, but he couldn’t doubt that he was
    doubting, and with this thought, he started to build his beliefs from the
    ground up, with this realization of himself as a thinking being as the
    starting point.
    When philosophizing about the
    self, it would do us well to exert
    the same effort and desire that
    Descartes did. What are the things
    about yourself which you can
    really be sure are true?
    In our desire to know more about
    ourselves and how we relate to the
    world, it is important to keep in mind
    that our search for answers should be
    grounded in truth. We would do not
    only ourselves, but everyone else a PHILOSOPHY
    disservice if we based who we are on
    qualities or characteristics that are not
    APPLIED
    really true. Just like Descartes, we
    owe it to ourselves to be as honest as
    possible in our journey of self-
    discovery.

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