The Self from

Various Philosophical
Perspective
(Understanding the Self)

Submitted by:
Corado, Bianca Erika
Javier, Angela Dane
Martin, Christine Joyce
Peñalosa, Angelo
Principe, Ellen Mae
BSA 1- 5

November 18, 2019

 SOCRATES
Greek Philosopher

Born on: Died on:

c. 470 B.C.E. 399 B.C.E.
(Athens, Greece) (Athens, Greece)

Biography
Socrates was born circa 470 B.C. in Athens, Greece. Socrates' life is written through only a few
sources: the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon and the plays of Aristophanes. Because there were no
official writings on his like, these sources are likely to be inaccurate as it is only written for the purpose of
reporting his life and his teaching. Most writings about Socrates’ life can be found on Plato’s dialogues.
Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus, an Athenian stonemason and sculptor, and Phaenarete, a midwife.
Because he was not from a noble family, he probably received a basic Greek education and learned his
father's craft at a young age. It's believed Socrates worked as mason for many years before he devoted
his life to philosophy. He married his wife named, Xanthippe, who bore him three sons: Lamprocles,
Sophroniscus and Menexenus.

Athenian law required all able-bodied males serve as citizen soldiers, on call for duty from ages
18 until 60. According to the writings of Plato, Socrates served as a soldier. Apparently, his family had
moderate wealth in order to put him in the armored infantry. As an infantryman, he showed great physical
strength and endurance in rescuing their Athenian leaders in the war. He had also been deployed for
several battles in the Peloponnesian War, but he has also kept his desire of learning through the siege.
Through this, Socrates had made himself known for questioning everything and everyone.
 Though Socrates himself wrote none of his teachings, his students (Plato and Xenophon) made
dialogues about his teachings and his beliefs. Socrates’ life can also be found in comedies written by
playwright, Aristophanes, who claimed to have known Socrates in his early years. The life of Socrates was
portrayed in a comedy written by Aristophanes, called Clouds, which was produce in 423 B.C.E. These
accounts of Socrates’ life were put to question because comedies, in their own sense, are merely a source
of entertainment and its purpose is to mock a person. Comedies, by their own nature, can be a tricky
source of information. That is why most sources and accounts of Socrates’ life were mostly from Plato and
Xenophon.

After the war, Socrates had devoted himself to philosophy. He became famous for his style of
teaching – Socratic Method, wherein he would not give answers to the questions of his students, rather
he would ask them questions in order for them to arrive to their understanding. Through his style of
teaching and impiety, he was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and was sentenced to death. He
chose to accept his sentence instead of fleeing into exile. He died from hemlock poisoning in 399 B.C.E.

Other famous contributions of Socrates are his views on self-knowledge, virtues, and paradoxes -
Socratic dialogue, Socratic intellectualism, Socratic irony · Socratic method, Socratic paradox, Socratic
questioning, and Socratic problem. Through his beliefs and teachings, Socrates has become one of the
most influential philosophers in both ancient and modern philosophy. In fact, he is considered as the
Father of Western philosophy.

Perspective on Self:
Socrates believed that philosophy had a very important role to play in the lives of individuals and
in Plato’s dialogue, the Gorgias he explained why he held such a belief. The famous phrase: “Know thyself,”
which was found in the Temple of Apollo influenced Socrates’ desire to learn about self. Socrates believed
that the value of self-knowledge consisted in one’s ability to recognize the limits of what they know,
which, Socrates ultimately thought, was nothing. Through this, he concluded that “the unexamined life is
not worth living.” Examining one’s self is the most important task one can undertake, for it alone will give
us the knowledge necessary to answer the question ‘how should I live my life’. As Socrates
explained: “…once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves, but otherwise we never
shall.”

According to Socrates it is the state of our soul, or our inner being, which determines the quality
of our life. Thus it is paramount that we devote considerable amounts of our attention, energy, and
resources to making our soul as good and beautiful as possible. Or as he pronounces in Plato’s dialogue
the Apology: “I shall never give up philosophy or stop exhorting you and pointing out the truth to any one
of you whom I meet, saying in my most accustomed way.

After coming to the realization that one’s inner self, or soul, is all important, Socrates believed the
next step in the path towards self-knowledge was to obtain knowledge of what is good and what is evil,
and in the process use what one learns to cultivate the good within one’s soul and purge the evil from it.

While most people described that things such as wealth, status, social acceptance, and pleasure
are those that promote the greatest good and things such as poverty, death, pain, and social rejection are
the greatest of all evils, Socrates believed that this way of thinking is harmful for one’s self. He believed
that all human beings naturally strive for happiness, for happiness is the final end in life and everything
we do we do because we think it will make us happy. We therefore label what we think will bring us
happiness as ‘good’, and those things we think will bring us suffering and pain as ‘evil’. So it follows that
if we have a mistaken conception of what is good, then we will spend our lives frantically chasing after
things that will not bring us happiness even if we attain them.

However, according to Socrates, if one devoted themselves to self-knowledge and philosophical

inquiry, they would soon be led to a more appropriate view of the good. There is one supreme good, he
claimed, and possession of this good alone will secure our happiness. This supreme good, thought
Socrates, is virtue. Socrates claimed virtue to be the greatest good in life because it alone was capable of
securing one’s happiness. Even death is a trivial matter for the truly virtuous individual who realizes that
the most important thing in life is the state of his soul and the actions which spring from it.

Sources:

History.com Editors. “Article: Socrates.” A&E Television Networks. Retrieved from

https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-history/socrates

Biography.com Editors. “Socrates Biography.” A&E Television Networks. Retrieved from

https://www.biography.com/scholar/socrates

Richard Kraut. “Socrates.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Retrieved from

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Socrates

Academy of Ideas.com Editors. “The Ideas of Socrates.” Academy of Ideas. Retrieved from
https://academyofideas.com/2015/03/the-ideas-of-socrates-transcript/

Nails, Debra, "Socrates", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018 Edition), Retrieved from
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/socrates/
 PLATO
Greek Philosopher, mathematician

Born on: Died on:

c. 424/423 B.C.E. c. 348/347 B.C.E.
(Athens, Greece) (Athens, Greece)

Biography
Plato was Born circa 428 B.C.E., ancient Greek philosopher Plato was a student of Socrates and a
teacher of Aristotle. His writings explored justice, beauty and equality, and also contained discussions in
aesthetics, political philosophy, theology, cosmology, epistemology and the philosophy of language. Plato
founded the Academy in Athens, one of the first institutions of higher learning in the Western world. He
died in Athens circa 348 B.C.E.

The same as his teacher, Socrates, Plato's life has been constructed by scholars through his
writings and the writings of contemporaries and classical historians. Both of his parents came from the
Greek aristocracy. Plato's father, Ariston, descended from the kings of Athens and Messenia. His mother,
Perictione, is said to be related to the 6th century B.C.E. Greek statesman Solon. Because of his social
status and family lineage, Plato must have received teachings from the finest educators in the ancient
Greek. The curriculum would have featured the doctrines of Cratylus and Pythagoras as well as
Parmenides. These probably helped develop the foundation for Plato's study of metaphysics (the study of
nature) and epistemology (the study of knowledge).

Plato experienced two major events that set his course in life. One was meeting the great Greek
philosopher Socrates. Socrates' methods of dialogue and debate impressed Plato so much that he soon
he became a close associate and dedicated his life to the question of virtue and the formation of a noble
character. Also, Plato served during the Peloponnesian War. The defeat of Athens ended its democracy,
which the Spartans replaced with an oligarchy. After the oligarchy was overthrown and democracy was
restored, Plato briefly considered a career in politics, but the execution of Socrates in 399 B.C.E. soured
him on this idea and he turned to a life of study and philosophy.

After Socrates’ death, Plato traveled for 12 years throughout the Mediterranean region, studying
mathematics with the Pythagoreans in Italy, and geometry, geology, astronomy and religion in Egypt.
During this time, or soon after, he began his extensive writing. During Plato’s travels, he devoted his time
in writing all he learned from Socrates. In the early years of his travels, he wrote the “Apology of Socrates,”
which contains all of Socrates’ philosophical beliefs and teachings. In the middle period of his travels, Plato
focused on voicing out his own ideas of justice, courage, wisdom, and moderation of the individual and
society. He wrote one of his famous works, “The Republic” during this period with its purpose on of having
a just government ruled by philosopher kings. In the late period of his travels, Plato takes a closer look at
his own early metaphysical ideas. He explores the role of art, including dance, music, drama and
architecture, as well as ethics and morality. In his writings on the “Theory of Forms,” Plato suggests that
the world of ideas is the only constant and that the perceived world through our senses is deceptive and
changeable.

At around 385 B.C.E., Plato founded a school of learning, known as the Academy. The Academy
operated until 529 C.E.., when it was closed by Roman Emperor Justinian I, who feared it was a source of
paganism and a threat to Christianity. Over its years of operation, the Academy's curriculum included
astronomy, biology, mathematics, political theory and philosophy.

Perspective on Self:
Plato believed that the “The soul is immortal.” According to him, the self consists of reason, spirit
or passion, and physical appetite. Reason means think deeply about something, spirit includes basic
emotion, and physical appetite includes our basic biological needs. These three have relation with each
other. In short, to live a happy life, humans must consistently make sure that their reason is in control of
their spirit and appetite.

Sources:

Biography.com Editors. “Plato Biography.” A&E Television Networks. Retrieved from

https://www.biography.com/scholar/plato

Constance C. Meinwald. “Plato.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Retrieved from

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Plato

I AM ROLEX.com “The Philosophical Perspective of Self.” ROLEX. Retrieved from

https://iamrolex.wordpress.com/2018/09/06/the-philosophical-perspective-of-the-self/
 ARISTOTLE
Greek Philosopher, scientist
Born on: Died on:
c. 384 B.C.E. c. 322 B.C.E.
(Stagira, Chalcidice, Greece) (Chalcis, Euboea)

Biography
Aristotle was born in 384 B.C. in Stagira in northern Greece. He was an Ancient Greek philosopher
and scientist who is considered as one of the greatest thinkers in politics, psychology, and ethics.
Aristotle’s father, Nicomachus, was court physician to the Macedonian king Amyntas II. Although
Nicomachus died when Aristotle was just a young boy, Aristotle remained closely affiliated with and
influenced by the Macedonian court for the rest of his life. Little is known about his mother, Phaestis; she
is also believed to have died when Aristotle was young. After his parents died, Aristotle was raised by
Proxenus, who was the husband of his father’s sister. Proxenus became Aristotle’s guardian until he
reached the age of majority.

When Aristotle turned 17, Proxenus sent him to Athens to pursue higher education. While he was
in Athens, he enrolled in Plato’s Academy and became an exemplary student of Plato. Aristotle maintained
a relationship with Greek philosopher Plato. Though Plato and Socrates were good colleagues, Aristotle
disagreed with some of Plato’s philosophical beliefs. When Plato died about 348, his
nephew Speusippus became head of the Academy, and Aristotle left Athens. He migrated to Assus, where
the ruler was a graduate of the Academy. While he was in Assus, he devoted his time in extensive scientific
research, particularly in zoology and marine biology. In this period also, he married his wife Pythias, with
whom he had his only daughter, also named Pythias. Then in 342 B.C.E., Aristotle was summoned by Philip
II to the Macedonian capital at Pella to act as a teacher to Philip’s 13-year-old son, the future Alexander
the Great.

At around 335 B.C.E., Aristotle returned to Athens in which he had founded the Lyceum. The
Lyceum attracted students from throughout the Greek world and developed a curriculum centered on its
founder’s teachings. In accordance with Aristotle’s principle of surveying the writings of others as part of
the philosophical process, the Lyceum assembled a collection of manuscripts that comprised one of the
world’s first great libraries.

During his time at the Lyceum, Aristotle wrote an estimated 200 works, most in the form of notes
and manuscript drafts touching on reasoning, rhetoric, politics, ethics, science and psychology. Most of
his works consist of dialogues, records of scientific observations, and systematic works. Of Aristotle’s
estimated 200 works, only 31 are still in circulation. The surviving works of Aristotle are grouped into four
categories. The “Organon” is a set of writings that provide a logical toolkit for use in any philosophical or
scientific investigation. Next is Aristotle’s theoretical works, most famously his treatises on animals (“Parts
of Animals,” “Movement of Animals,” etc.), cosmology, the “Physics” (a basic inquiry about the nature of
matter and change) and the “Metaphysics” (a quasi-theological investigation of existence itself). Third are
Aristotle’s so-called practical works, notably the “Nicomachean Ethics” and “Politics,” both deep
investigations into the nature of human flourishing on the individual, familial and societal levels. Finally,
his “Rhetoric” and “Poetics,” which examine the finished products of human productivity, including what
makes for a convincing argument and how a well-wrought tragedy can instill cathartic fear and pity.

Perspective on Self
Unlike Plato’s belief, Aristotle insisted that the human being is a composite of body and soul and
that the soul cannot be separated from the body. Aristotle’s philosophy of self was constructed in terms
of hylomorphism, in which the soul of a human being is the form or the structure of the human body or
the human matter.

Aristotle concluded that the true self of each human being (as essentially a substantial form or a
soul that may be in a sense an individual, but that, as far as it is a form or a soul), is similar to the form or
the soul of any other human being. However, Aristotle also recognized that each human soul (or the soul
of any other living thing) has a distinctively individual career and life-history as far as it animates a
particular human body acting in a particular environment. It might seem that in principle, it would have
been open for Aristotle to give quite a lot of attention to this aspect of individual careers and life-histories
within his hylomorphist framework. (J. Sihvola, 2008)

Aristotle stated that, “The soul is the essence of the self.” For him, the body and soul are not two
separate elements, but is one thing. The soul is the essence of the self but it cannot exist without the
body. In addition, he stated that we are a rational animal or through reason we became human. So
basically, we are defined based on our reason that gives us our distinct characteristics.

Sources:

History.com Editors. “Aristotle.” A&E Television Networks. Retrieved from https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-

history/aristotle
Biography.com Editors. “Aristotle Biography.” A&E Television Networks. Retrieved from
https://www.biography.com/scholar/aristotle

Anthony J.P. Kenny and Anselm H. Amadio. “Aristotle.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Retrieved from
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aristotle

I AM ROLEX.com “The Philosophical Perspective of Self.” ROLEX. Retrieved from

https://iamrolex.wordpress.com/2018/09/06/the-philosophical-perspective-of-the-self/

Juha Sihvola. “Aristotle on the Individuality of Self.” Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008. Retrieved from
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aristotle
 SAINT AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
Neoplatonic Philosopher

Born on: Died on:

November 13, 354 AD August 28, 430 AD
(Thagaste) (Hippo Regius, Annaba, Algeria)

Biography
Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430), bishop and Doctor of the Church is best known for his
Confessions (401), his autobiographical account of his conversion. The term augustinianism evolved from
his writings that had a profound influence on the church.

Augustine was born at Tagaste (now Algeria) in North Africa on 13 November, 354. His father,
Patricius, while holding an official position in the city remained a pagan until converting on his deathbed.
His mother, Saint Monica, was a devout Christian. She had had Augustine signed with the cross and
enrolled among the catechumens but unable to secure his baptism. Her grief was great when young
Augustine fell gravely ill and agreed to be baptised only to withdraw his consent upon recovery,
denouncing the Christian faith.

At the encouragement of Monica, his extensive religious education started in the schools of Tagaste
(an important part of the Roman Empire) and Madaura until he was sixteen. He was off to Carthage next
in 370, but soon fell to the pleasures and excesses of the half pagan city’s theatres, licentiousness and
decadent socialising with fellow students. After a time he confessed to Monica that he had been living in
sin with a woman with whom he had a son in 372, Adeodatus, (which means Gift of God).
 Still a student, and with a newfound desire to focus yet again on exploration of his faith, in 373
Augustine became a confirmed Manichaean, much against his mother’s wishes. He was enticed by its
promise of free philosophy which attracted his intellectual interest in the natural sciences. It did not
however erase his moral turmoil of finding his faith. His intellect having attained full maturity, he returned
to Tagaste then Carthage to teach rhetoric, being very popular among his students. Now in his thirties, his
spiritual journey led him away from Manichaeism after nine years because of disagreement with its
cosmology and a disenchanting meeting with the celebrated Manichaean bishop, Faustus of Mileve.

Passing through yet another period of spiritual struggle, Augustine went to Italy in 383, studying
Neo-platonic philosophy. Enthralled by his kindness and generous spirit, he became a pupil of Ambrose.
At the age of thirty-three, the epiphany and clarity of purpose which Augustine had sought for so long
finally came to him in Milan in 386 through a vast stream of tears as he lay prostrate under a fig tree. He
was baptised by Ambrose in 387 much to the eternal delight of his mother, “..nothing is far from God.”
The next event in his life leads to some of the most profound and exquisite writings on love and grief; the
death of his mother Monica.

Surrounded by friends, Augustine now returned to his native Tagaste where he devoted himself to
the rule in a quasi-monastic life to prayer and studying sacred letters and to finding harmony between the
philosophical questions that plagued his mind and his faith in Christianity. He was ordained as priest in
391.

For the next five years Augustine’s priestly life was fruitful, consisting of administration of church
business, tending to the poor, preaching and writing and acting as judge for civil and ecclesiastical cases,
always the defender of truth and a compassionate shepherd of souls. At the age of forty-two he then
became coadjutor-bishop of Hippo. From 396 till his death in 439, he ruled the diocese alone. At that point
the Roman Empire was in disintegration, and at the time of his death the Vandals where at the gates of
Hippo. 28 August, 430, in the seventy-sixth year of his age Augustine succumbed to a fatal illness. His relics
were translated from Sardinia to Pavia by Luitprand, King of the Lombards. Saint Augustine is often
depicted as one of the Four Latin Doctors in many paintings, frescoes and stained glass throughout the
world. “Unhappy is the soul enslaved by the love of anything that is mortal.” Saint Augustine. The cult of
Augustine formed swiftly and was widespread. His feast is celebrated on 28 August.

Saint Augustine’s books, essays and letters of Christian Revelation are probably more influential in
the history of thought than any other Christian writer since St. Paul, namely his Confessions, sermons on
the Gospel and the Epistle of John, the The Trinity (400-416) and what he finished late in life, the The City
of God (426), writings that deal with the opposition between Christianity and the `world' and represents
the first Christian philosophy of history. He also wrote of the controversies with Manicheans, Pelagians,
and Donatists which helped lead to his ideas on Creation, Grace, the Sacraments and the Church. There is
a massive collection of his writings and they also include: Soliloquies (386-387), On Grace and Free Will.
(426) Retractions (426-427) and Letters (386-430).
 Perspective of Self:
God and the Soul: Augustine on the Journey to True Selfhood

Augustine's sense of self is his relation to God, both in his recognition of God's love and his response
to it—achieved through self-presentation, then self-realization. Augustine believed one could not achieve
inner peace without finding God's love.

In the past century, the decentering or opacity of the self has been of increasing importance in
philosophy, whether in existentialism, psychoanalysis, or post‐modernism. This is often seen as a new
development after the confidence of Enlightenment and 19th century thought. While there are certainly
new trends in these schools of thought, they are not without precedent: Augustine wrestled with the
problem of selfhood and self‐knowledge. In fact, he saw it as one of the two primary issues for the
intellect, claiming in his Soliloquiorum that he sought only to know ‘God and the soul.’1 The similarities of
Augustine's search to contemporary concerns, especially those of Christian existentialists, is marked and
important. Augustine, in writing his spiritual exercises, reveals to his readers the groundwork needed to
return to true selfhood. We should not treat Augustine's philosophy of form and his existential concerns
as unrelated but reflect on them as revealing our existential predicament. Further, we must recognize the
epistemic problem of ourselves as known‐unknowns; this is the hint that leads us to become persons on
the way to self‐knowledge. Recognizing this, we can see that the necessary condition for knowing oneself
is that we must come to ourselves, stop wandering, and start the journey to selfhood. We come to
ourselves as lost but able to perceive the rough contours of our way home. The way home is a turn from
created goods to our inner selves where we find the Selfsame who calls us to become selfsames. By
reflecting on the beginning of the journey to true selfhood, Augustine shows that we can establish the
conditions for selfhood by becoming and remaining peregrini, focused on the mystery of our self and our
God, while ever seeking to return to our true home with God who is the very self of our selves.

Augustine has shown the structure of the beginning of the journey to selfhood, of the coming to
oneself needed to start our return. The journey will require many things, including but not limited to:
desire of the good, true, and beautiful, askesis of sinful desires, a faith which inspires study and not
curiosity, growth in understanding, collecting (cogitate) oneself together, binding (religio) oneself to God,
and above all, the grace to begin and continue.73 From the moment the soul comes to itself, it begins a
long and difficult journey. As Philip Carey makes clear ‘for Augustine, the road to happiness is long and
arduous—but at the end of it we find a homeland that is natural to us.’74 All of this means, we must keep
going. The peregrinus does not arrive home by merely realizing he or she is not at home. The
Confessionum demonstrates that this is not something accomplished all at once. Even after Augustine's
conversions, his reflections on memory and time show a man journeying to himself and to his home. This
journey will take him to the depth of his being to find the very Source of being. However, the conditions
for selfhood have been laid in this coming to himself. For Augustine, the spiritual exercise of writing the
Confessionum is meant to aid his reader in having this moment. He is trying to help us realize we are an
enigma, that the lovely goods we pour ourselves into are telling us to turn inward, and in turning inward
we turn up to the Selfsame who is the ground and goal of our self. In other words, Augustine wants us
discover that to reach the journey's destination, we must begin the journey.
Sources:

Augustine, Confessionum libri tredecim, Second Edition, Translated by F.J. Sheed. (Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2006. Retrieved from
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/heyj.12166

"From <em>Confessions,</em> what is the "self" according to Augustine?" eNotes Editorial, 19 Dec. 2012,
Retrieved from https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-self-according-augustine-378193.
Accessed 15 Nov. 2019.

Biography written by C.D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc 2005. Retrieved from
http://www.online-literature.com/saint-augustine/
 THOMAS AQUINAS
Italian philosopher

Born on: Died on:

1224/25 March 7, 1274
(Roccasecca, Italy) (Abbazia di Fossanova, Fossanova Abbey, Italy)

Biography
St. Thomas Aquinas, Italian San Tommaso d’Aquino, also called Aquinas, byname Doctor Angelicus
(Latin: “Angelic Doctor”), (born 1224/25, Roccasecca, near Aquino, Terra di Lavoro, Kingdom of Sicily
[Italy]—died March 7, 1274, Fossanova, near Terracina, Latium, Papal States; canonized July 18, 1323;
feast day January 28, formerly March 7), Italian Dominican theologian, the foremost medieval Scholastic.
He developed his own conclusions from Aristotelian premises, notably in the metaphysics of personality,
creation, and Providence. As a theologian, he was responsible in his two masterpieces, the Summa
theologiae and the Summa contra gentiles, for the classical systematization of Latin theology, and, as a
poet, he wrote some of the most gravely beautiful eucharistic hymns in the church’s liturgy. His doctrinal
system and the explanations and developments made by his followers are known as Thomism. Although
many modern Roman Catholic theologians do not find St. Thomas altogether congenial, he is nevertheless
recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as its foremost Western philosopher and theologian.

Thomas was born to parents who were in possession of a modest feudal domain on a boundary
constantly disputed by the emperor and the pope. His father was of Lombard origin; his mother was of
the later invading Norman heritage. His people were distinguished in the service of Emperor Frederick II
during the civil strife in southern Italy between the papal and imperial forces. Thomas was placed in the
monastery of Monte Cassino near his home as an oblate (i.e., offered as a prospective monk) when he
was still a young boy; his family doubtless hoped that he would someday become abbot to their
advantage. In 1239, after nine years in this sanctuary of spiritual and cultural life, young Thomas was
forced to return to his family when the emperor expelled the monks because they were too obedient to
the pope. He was then sent to the University of Naples, recently founded by the emperor, where he first
encountered the scientific and philosophical works that were being translated from Greek and Arabic. In
this setting Thomas decided to join the Friars Preachers, or Dominicans, a new religious order founded 30
years earlier, which departed from the traditional paternalistic form of government for monks to the more
democratic form of the mendicant friars (i.e., religious orders whose corporate as well as personal poverty
made it necessary for them to beg alms) and from the monastic life of prayer and manual labour to a more
active life of preaching and teaching. By this move he took a liberating step beyond the feudal world into
which he was born and the monastic spirituality in which he was reared. A dramatic episode marked the
full significance of his decision. His parents had him abducted on the road to Paris, where his shrewd
superiors had immediately assigned him so that he would be out of the reach of his family but also so that
he could pursue his studies in the most prestigious and turbulent university of the time.

Thomas held out stubbornly against his family despite a year of captivity. He was finally liberated
and in the autumn of 1245 went to Paris to the convent of Saint-Jacques, the great university centre of
the Dominicans; there he studied under St. Albertus Magnus, a tremendous scholar with a wide range of
intellectual interests. Escape from the feudal world, rapid commitment to the University of Paris, and
religious vocation to one of the new mendicant orders all meant a great deal in a world in which faith in
the traditional institutional and conceptual structure was being attacked. The encounter between the
gospel and the culture of his time formed the nerve centre of Thomas’s position and directed its
development. Normally, his work is presented as the integration into Christian thought of the recently
discovered Aristotelian philosophy, in competition with the integration of Platonic thought effected by
the Fathers of the Church during the first 12 centuries of the Christian Era. This view is essentially correct;
more radically, however, it should also be asserted that Thomas’s work accomplished an evangelical
awakening to the need for a cultural and spiritual renewal not only in the lives of individual men but also
throughout the church. Thomas must be understood in his context as a mendicant religious, influenced
both by the evangelism of St. Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan order, and by the devotion to
scholarship of St. Dominic, founder of the Dominican order.

When Thomas Aquinas arrived at the University of Paris, the influx of Arabian-Aristotelian science
was arousing a sharp reaction among believers, and several times the church authorities tried to block the
naturalism and rationalism that were emanating from this philosophy and, according to many
ecclesiastics, seducing the younger generations. Thomas did not fear these new ideas, but, like his master
Albertus Magnus (and Roger Bacon, also lecturing at Paris), he studied the works of Aristotle and
eventually lectured publicly on them.

For the first time in history, Christian believers and theologians were confronted with the rigorous
demands of scientific rationalism. At the same time, technical progress was requiring men to move from
the rudimentary economy of an agrarian society to an urban society with production organized in trade
guilds, with a market economy, and with a profound feeling of community. New generations of men and
women, including clerics, were reacting against the traditional notion of contempt for the world and were
striving for mastery over the forces of nature through the use of their reason. The structure of Aristotle’s
philosophy emphasized the primacy of the intelligence. Technology itself became a means of access to
truth; mechanical arts were powers for humanizing the cosmos. Thus, the dispute over the reality of
universals—i.e., the question about the relation between general words such as “red” and particulars such
as “this red object”—which had dominated early Scholastic philosophy, was left behind, and a coherent
metaphysics of knowledge and of the world was being developed.

During the summer of 1248, Aquinas left Paris with Albertus, who was to assume direction of the
new faculty established by the Dominicans at the convent in Cologne. He remained there until 1252, when
he returned to Paris to prepare for the degree of master of theology. After taking his bachelor’s degree,
he received the licentia docendi (“license to teach”) at the beginning of 1256 and shortly afterward
finished the training necessary for the title and privileges of master. Thus, in the year 1256 he began
teaching theology in one of the two Dominican schools incorporated in the University of Paris.

Perspective on Self:
Thomas Aquinas – Toward a Deeper Sense of Self

The reality is, we all lack self-knowledge to some degree, and the pursuit of self-knowledge is a
lifelong quest—often a painful one. For instance, a common phenomenon studied in psychology is the
“loss of a sense of self” that occurs when a familiar way of thinking about oneself (for example, as “a
healthy person,” “someone who earns a good wage,” “a parent”) is suddenly stripped away by a major
life change or tragedy. Forced to face oneself for the first time without these protective labels, one can
feel as though the ground has been suddenly cut out from under one’s feet: Who am I, really?

But the reality of self-ignorance is something of a philosophical puzzle. Why do we need to work at
gaining knowledge about ourselves? In other cases, ignorance results from a lack of experience. No
surprise that I confuse kangaroos with wallabies: I’ve never seen either in real life. Of course I don’t know
what number you’re thinking about: I can’t see inside your mind. But what excuse do I have for being
ignorant of anything having to do with myself? I already am myself! I, and I alone, can experience my
own mind from the inside. This insider knowledge makes me—as communications specialists are
constantly reminding us—the unchallenged authority on “what I feel” or “what I think.” So why is it a
lifelong project for me to gain insight into my own thoughts, habits, impulses, reasons for acting, or the
nature of the mind itself?

This is called the “problem of self-opacity,” and we’re not the only ones to puzzle over it: It was also
of great interest to the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), whose theory of self-knowledge is
documented in my new book Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge. It’s a common scholarly myth that early
modern philosophers (starting with Descartes) invented the idea of the human being as a “self” or
“subject.” My book tries to dispel that myth, showing that like philosophers and neuroscientists today,
medieval thinkers were just as curious about why the mind is so intimately familiar, and yet so
inaccessible, to itself. (In fact, long before Freud, medieval Latin and Islamic thinkers were speculating
about a subconscious, inaccessible realm in the mind.) The more we study the medieval period, the
clearer it becomes that inquiry into the self does not start with Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” Rather,
Descartes was taking sides in a debate about self-knowledge that had already begun in the thirteenth
century and earlier.

For Aquinas, we don’t encounter ourselves as isolated minds or selves, but rather always as agents
interacting with our environment.

Aquinas begins his theory of self-knowledge from the claim that all our self-knowledge is dependent
on our experience of the world around us. He rejects a view that was popular at the time, i.e., that the
mind is “always on,” never sleeping, subconsciously self-aware in the background. Instead, Aquinas
argues, our awareness of ourselves is triggered and shaped by our experiences of objects in our
environment. He pictures the mind as as a sort of undetermined mental “putty” that takes shape when
it is activated in knowing something. By itself, the mind is dark and formless; but in the moment of acting,
it is “lit up” to itself from the inside and sees itself engaged in that act. In other words, when I long for a
cup of mid-afternoon coffee, I’m not just aware of the coffee, but of myself as the one wanting it. So for
Aquinas, we don’t encounter ourselves as isolated minds or selves, but rather always as agents interacting
with our environment. That’s why the labels we apply to ourselves—“a gardener,” “a patient person,” or
“a coffee-lover”—are always taken from what we do or feel or think toward other things.

But if we “see” ourselves from the inside at the moment of acting, what about the “problem of self-
opacity” mentioned above? Instead of lacking self-knowledge, shouldn’t we be able to “see” everything
about ourselves clearly? Aquinas’s answer is that just because we experience something doesn’t mean
we instantly understand everything about it—or to use his terminology: experiencing that something
exists doesn’t tell us what it is. (By comparison: If someday I encounter a wallaby, that won’t make me an
expert about wallabies.) Learning about a thing’s nature requires a long process of gathering evidence
and drawing conclusions, and even then we may never fully understand it. The same applies to the mind.
I am absolutely certain, with an insider’s perspective that no one else can have, of the reality of my
experience of wanting another cup of coffee. But the significance of those experiences—what they are,
what they tell me about myself and the nature of the mind—requires further experience and reasoning.
Am I hooked on caffeine? What is a “desire” and why do we have desires? These questions can only be
answered by reasoning about the evidence taken from many experiences.

Aquinas, then, would surely approve that we’re not drawn to search online for answers to the
question, “Who am I?” That question can only be answered “from the inside” by me, the one asking the
question. At the same time, answering this question isn’t a matter of withdrawing from the world and
turning in on ourselves. It’s a matter of becoming more aware of ourselves at the moment of engaging
with reality, and drawing conclusions about what our activities towards other things “say” about us.
There’s Aquinas’s “prescription” for a deeper sense of self.

Sources:

St. Thomas Aquinas - ITALIAN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIAN AND PHILOSOPHER Marie-Dominique Chenu. Oct
29, 2019. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Thomas-
Aquinas#accordion-article-history

Thomas Aquinas – Toward a Deeper Sense of Self. Therese Scarpelli Cory. Jan 24, 2014. Retrieved from
http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2014/01/thomas-aquinas-toward-a-deeper-sense-of-self/
 RENE DESCARTES
French Philosopher

Born on: Died on:

March 31, 1596 February 11, 1650
(Descartes, France) (Stockholm, Sweden)

Biography
René Descartes, (born March 31, 1596, La Haye, Touraine, France—died February 11, 1650,
Stockholm, Sweden), French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. Because he was one of the first
to abandon Scholastic Aristotelianism, because he formulated the first modern version of mind-body
dualism, from which stems the mind-body problem, and because he promoted the development of a new
science grounded in observation and experiment, he has been called the father of modern philosophy.
Applying an original system of methodical doubt, he dismissed apparent knowledge derived from
authority, the senses, and reason and erected new epistemic foundations on the basis of the intuition
that, when he is thinking, he exists; this he expressed in the dictum “I think, therefore I am” (best known
in its Latin formulation, “Cogito, ergo sum,” though originally written in French, “Je pense, donc je suis”).
He developed a metaphysical dualism that distinguishes radically between mind, the essence of which is
thinking, and matter, the essence of which is extension in three dimensions. Descartes’s metaphysics is
rationalist, based on the postulation of innate ideas of mind, matter, and God, but his physics and
physiology, based on sensory experience, are mechanistic and empiricist

Although Descartes’s birthplace, La Haye (now Descartes), France, is in Touraine, his family
connections lie south, across the Creuse River in Poitou, where his father, Joachim, owned farms and
houses in Châtellerault and Poitiers. Because Joachim was a councillor in the Parlement of Brittany in
Rennes, Descartes inherited a modest rank of nobility. Descartes’s mother died when he was one year
old. His father remarried in Rennes, leaving him in La Haye to be raised first by his maternal grandmother
and then by his great-uncle in Châtellerault. Although the Descartes family was Roman Catholic, the Poitou
region was controlled by the Protestant Huguenots, and Châtellerault, a Protestant stronghold, was the
site of negotiations over the Edict of Nantes (1598), which gave Protestants freedom of worship in France
following the intermittent Wars of Religion between Protestant and Catholic forces in France. Descartes
returned to Poitou regularly until 1628.

In 1606 Descartes was sent to the Jesuit college at La Flèche, established in 1604 by Henry IV
(reigned 1589–1610). At La Flèche, 1,200 young men were trained for careers in military engineering, the
judiciary, and government administration. In addition to classical studies, science, mathematics, and
metaphysics—Aristotle was taught from Scholastic commentaries—they studied acting, music, poetry,
dancing, riding, and fencing. In 1610 Descartes participated in an imposing ceremony in which the heart
of Henry IV, whose assassination that year had destroyed the hope of religious tolerance in France and
Germany, was placed in the cathedral at La Flèche.

In 1614 Descartes went to Poitiers, where he took a law degree in 1616. At this time, Huguenot
Poitiers was in virtual revolt against the young King Louis XIII (reigned 1610–43). Descartes’s father
probably expected him to enter Parlement, but the minimum age for doing so was 27, and Descartes was
only 20. In 1618 he went to Breda in the Netherlands, where he spent 15 months as an informal student
of mathematics and military architecture in the peacetime army of the Protestant stadholder, Prince
Maurice (ruled 1585–1625). In Breda, Descartes was encouraged in his studies of science and mathematics
by the physicist Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637), for whom he wrote the Compendium of Music (written
1618, published 1650), his first surviving work.

Descartes spent the period 1619 to 1628 traveling in northern and southern Europe, where, as he
later explained, he studied “the book of the world.” While in Bohemia in 1619, he invented analytic
geometry, a method of solving geometric problems algebraically and algebraic problems geometrically.
He also devised a universal method of deductive reasoning, based on mathematics, that is applicable to
all the sciences. This method, which he later formulated in Discourse on Method (1637) and Rules for the
Direction of the Mind (written by 1628 but not published until 1701), consists of four rules: (1) accept
nothing as true that is not self-evident, (2) divide problems into their simplest parts, (3) solve problems
by proceeding from simple to complex, and (4) recheck the reasoning. These rules are a direct application
of mathematical procedures. In addition, Descartes insisted that all key notions and the limits of each
problem must be clearly defined.

Descartes also investigated reports of esoteric knowledge, such as the claims of the practitioners
of theosophy to be able to command nature. Although disappointed with the followers of the Catalan
mystic Ramon Llull (1232/33–1315/16) and the German alchemist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von
Nettesheim (1486–1535), he was impressed by the German mathematician Johann Faulhaber (1580–
1635), a member of the mystical society of the Rosicrucians.

Descartes shared a number of Rosicrucian goals and habits. Like the Rosicrucians, he lived alone
and in seclusion, changed his residence often (during his 22 years in the Netherlands, he lived in 18
different places), practiced medicine without charge, attempted to increase human longevity, and took
an optimistic view of the capacity of science to improve the human condition. At the end of his life, he left
a chest of personal papers (none of which has survived) with a Rosicrucian physician—his close friend
Corneille van Hogelande, who handled his affairs in the Netherlands. Despite these affinities, Descartes
rejected the Rosicrucians’ magical and mystical beliefs. For him, this period was a time of hope for a
revolution in science. The English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626), in Advancement of Learning
(1605), had earlier proposed a new science of observation and experiment to replace the traditional
Aristotelian science, as Descartes himself did later.

In 1622 Descartes moved to Paris. There he gambled, rode, fenced, and went to the court,concerts,
and the theatre. Among his friends were the poets Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (1597–1654), who dedicated
his Le Socrate chrétien (1652; “Christian Socrates”) to Descartes, and Théophile de Viau (1590–1626), who
was burned in effigy and imprisoned in 1623 for writing verses mocking religious themes. Descartes also
befriended the mathematician Claude Mydorge (1585–1647) and Father Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), a
man of universal learning who corresponded with hundreds of scholars, writers, mathematicians, and
scientists and who became Descartes’s main contact with the larger intellectual world. During this time
Descartes regularly hid from his friends to work, writing treatises, now lost, on fencing and metals. He
acquired a considerable reputation long before he published anything.

At a talk in 1628, Descartes denied the alchemist Chandoux’s claim that probabilities are as good as
certainties in science and demonstrated his own method for attaining certainty. The Cardinal Pierre de
Bérulle (1575–1629)—who had founded the Oratorian teaching congregation in 1611 as a rival to the
Jesuits—was present at the talk. Many commentators speculate that Bérulle urged Descartes to write a
metaphysics based on the philosophy of St. Augustine as a replacement for Jesuit teaching. Be that as it
may, within weeks Descartes left for the Netherlands, which was Protestant, and—taking great
precautions to conceal his address—did not return to France for 16 years. Some scholars claim that
Descartes adopted Bérulle as director of his conscience, but this is unlikely, given Descartes’s background
and beliefs (he came from a Huguenot province, he was not a Catholic enthusiast, he had been accused
of being a Rosicrucian, and he advocated religious tolerance and championed the use of reason).

Perspective on Self:
Rene’ Descartes’ Concept Of Self

After establishing the reasons behind his radical skepticism, Descartes goes on to ask himself what
he can know. In other words, what new foundations can he replace the old ones with? He quickly realizes
that it is subjective knowledge about his self that is most reliable, and embarks on an intellectual journey
to establish a firmer understanding of this.

He begins with an argument known commonly as the Cogito. He comes to understand that if he is
capable of doubting – which is precisely what he is doing – then he must exist. He may doubt everything
else, may be deceived about the existence of all other things, but he must necessarily exist. Cogito ergo
sum – I think therefore I am. Now, it’s important to note that Descartes does not actually phrase his
conclusion in this exact manner in the Meditations. It was only later that he came to use the famous latin
sentence to describe his findings. In fact, his phrasing in the meditations might be preferable, in that he
does not structure his thought process in the manner of a syllogism (a premise followed by a conclusion).
The reason for this is simple; the statement “I think therefore I am” is an incomplete argument. There is
a missing second premise; “all thinking things exist”. Thus, “cogito ergo sum” might actually be doubted
in some way. However, Descartes responds to this by claiming that the Cogito is not, in fact, a syllogism
(a stance that is strengthened by the fact that, as said, he does not present it as such in the Meditations).
The conclusion is reached through an intuitive leap, rather than a reasoned examination of two premises.
It is, after all, absurd to say that something can think and yet not exist at the same time.

After establishing the fact of his existence, Decartes goes on to ask himself what he is. He eventually
comes to describe himself as a thinking thing. But what is a thinking thing? The easiest way to understand
Decartes’ thoughts here is to look at his ideas regarding substance, the essence of a substance, and the
modes of a substance. A substance is defined as something that is capable of existing independently of all
things besides the sustaining power of God (which Decartes believes is necessary for anything to exist).
Let’s look at the mind in terms of these. Clearly, the mind can be viewed as a substance, since we can see
it existing independently (let’s not worry about chemicals in the brain for the nonce). What is its essence,
though? Well, according to Decartes, the essence of mind is thought, which he describes in terms of
doubting, affirming, judging, etc. This makes sense – a mind can be seen as something that is defined by
thought. The modes of the mind, then, are the various ways of thinking I just mentioned (doubting,
affirming, and so on and so forth).

So, Decartes has established that he is a thing that thinks, and he has achieved at least a sketchy
idea of what that means. He then starts to consider material objects in an attempt to understand his mind
even better, choosing to do this by examining a piece of wax. At first, the wax is hard and solid, smelling
slightly of flowers and tasting slightly of honey. It makes a sound when he taps it with his finger. However,
when it’s brought close to a flame it starts to melt, changing in shape and size, losing all taste and smell,
and it no longer makes a noise when he hits it (as it has softened). And yet, even though his senses are
perceiving something owning entirely different properties to those the wax had earlier, he is still conscious
of it as a piece of wax. The same piece of wax, even. His senses do not tell him this, so he reasons that the
way he really perceives the wax is through his mind. What does he perceive it as? An extended substance
that is flexible and changeable*. This tells him something important about the relationship between his
mind and the external world, and it also tells him that his senses are only of limited value. Naturally,
without his senses he would not be aware of the wax at all, but without a judging mind he would only
have a very muddled understanding of it.

One of the conclusions that Descartes draws from his examination of the wax is that he can never
know anything better than his own mind. This is because, whenever he comes to understand something
about a material thing, such as its size or shape, he is also becoming aware of the ability of his mind to
perceive and understand that property. Whenever he learns about material objects, then, he learns about
his mind. But he can learn things about his mind without learning anything new about the material world.
Therefore, his mind is more readily known to him than anything else. There is, however, one problem with
this. What he learns about his mind when examining the properties of an object – his ability to perceive
said properties – is in fact a property of his mind. However, Descartes himself regards properties as being
immaterial – it is the essence of a thing that truly matters. So it would seem that his conclusion here is
not entirely solid.
 This, then, is what Descartes views as the “self”; a thinking thing, as outlined above. There are some
further weaknesses to his arguments, but these deal mostly with particulars and I don’t want to deal with
them too throroughly here. Suffice it to say that while his main points are mostly sound, not all of his
conclusions should be taken at face value (this can of course be said of virtually everything, especially
when one is dealing with philosophy). To fully appreciate Descartes’ views on the self, however, an
understanding of his thoughts on dualism – another topic he adresses in theMeditations- is neccessary.
I’ll be looking at these shortly.

*Extended: something that occupies space. Flexible and changeable: something that can take on different
shapes and sizes.

Sources:

Descartes’ Concept of Self. (Poignantboy, 2012). Retrieved from

https://poignantboy.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/descartes-concept-of-self/

René Descartes FRENCH MATHEMATICIAN AND PHILOSOPHER. (Watson, 2019) Retrieved from
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rene-Descartes#accordion-article-history
 JOHN LOCKE
English Philosopher

Born on: Died on:

August 29, 1632 October 28, 1704
(Wrighton, England) (Oates, England)

Biography
John Locke was among the most famous philosophers and political theorists of the 17th century. He
is often regarded as the founder of a school of thought known as British Empiricism, and he made
foundational contributions to modern theories of limited, liberal government. He was also influential in
the areas of theology, religious toleration, and educational theory. In his most important work, the Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, Locke set out to offer an analysis of the human mind and its acquisition
of knowledge. He offered an empiricist theory according to which we acquire ideas through our
experience of the world. The mind is then able to examine, compare, and combine these ideas in
numerous different ways. Knowledge consists of a special kind of relationship between different ideas.

Locke’s emphasis on the philosophical examination of the human mind as a preliminary to the
philosophical investigation of the world and its contents represented a new approach to philosophy, one
which quickly gained a number of converts, especially in Great Britain. In addition to this broader project,
the Essay contains a series of more focused discussions on important, and widely divergent, philosophical
themes.

In politics, Locke is best known as a proponent of limited government. He uses a theory of natural
rights to argue that governments have obligations to their citizens, have only limited powers over their
citizens, and can ultimately be overthrown by citizens under certain circumstances. He also provided
powerful arguments in favor of religious toleration. This article attempts to give a broad overview of all
key areas of Locke’s thought.

John Locke was born in 1632 in Wrington, a small village in southwestern England. His father, also
named John, was a legal clerk and served with the Parliamentary forces in the English Civil War. His family
was well-to-do, but not of particularly high social or economic standing. Locke spent his childhood in the
West Country and as a teenager was sent to Westminster School in London.

Locke was successful at Westminster and earned a place at Christ Church, Oxford. He was to remain
in Oxford from 1652 until 1667. Although he had little appreciation for the traditional scholastic
philosophy he learned there, Locke was successful as a student and after completing his undergraduate
degree he held a series of administrative and academic posts in the college. Some of Locke’s duties
included instruction of undergraduates. One of his earliest substantive works, the Essays on the Law of
Nature, was developed in the course of his teaching duties. Much of Locke’s intellectual effort and energy
during his time at Oxford, especially during his later years there, was devoted to the study of medicine
and natural philosophy (what we would now call science). Locke read widely in these fields, participated
in various experiments, and became acquainted with Robert Boyle and many other notable natural
philosophers. He also undertook the normal course of education and training to become a physician.

Locke left Oxford for London in 1667 where he became attached to the family of Anthony Ashley
Cooper (then Lord Ashley, later the Earl of Shaftesbury). Locke may have played a number of roles in the
household, mostly likely serving as tutor to Ashley’s son. In London, Locke continued to pursue his
interests in medicine and natural philosophy. He formed a close working relationship with Thomas
Sydenham, who later became one the most famous physicians of the age. He made a number of contacts
within the newly formed Royal Society and became a member in 1668. He also acted as the personal
physician to Lord Ashley. Indeed, on one occasion Locke participated in a very delicate surgical operation
which Ashley credited with saving his life. Ashley was one of the most prominent English politicians at the
time. Through his patronage Locke was able to hold a series of governmental posts. Most of his work
related to policies in England’s American and Caribbean colonies. Most importantly, this was the period
in Locke’s life when he began the project which would culminate in his most famous work, the Essay
Concerning Human Understanding. The two earliest drafts of that work date from 1671. He was to
continue work on this project intermittently for nearly twenty years.

Locke travelled in France for several years starting in 1675. When he returned to England it was
only to be for a few years. The political scene had changed greatly while Locke was away. Shaftesbury (as
Ashley was now known) was out of favor and Locke’s association with him had become a liability. It was
around this time that Locke composed his most famous political work, the Two Treatises Concerning
Government. Although the Two Treatises would not be published until 1689 they show that he had already
solidified his views on the nature and proper form of government. Following Shaftesbury’s death Locke
fled to the Netherlands to escape political persecution. While there Locke travelled a great deal
(sometimes for his own safety) and worked on two projects. First, he continued work on the Essay.
Second, he wrote a work entitled Epistola de Tolerantia, which was published anonymously in 1689.
Locke’s experiences in England, France, and the Netherlands convinced him that governments should be
much more tolerant of religious diversity than was common at the time.

Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 Locke was able to return to England. He published
both the Essay and the Two Treatises (the second anonymously) shortly after his return. He initially stayed
in London but soon moved to the home of Francis and Damaris Masham in the small village of Oates,
Essex. Damaris Masham, who was the daughter of a notable philosopher named Ralph Cudworth, had
become acquainted with Locke several years before. The two formed a very close friendship which lasted
until Locke’s death. During this period Locke kept busy working on politics, toleration, philosophy,
economics, and educational theory.

Locke engaged in a number of controversies during his life, including a notable one with Jonas
Proast over toleration. But Locke’s most famous and philosophically important controversy was with
Edward Stillingfleet, the Bishop of Worcester. Stillingfleet, in addition to being a powerful political and
theological figure, was an astute and forceful critic. The two men debated a number of the positions in
the Essay in a series of published letters.

In his later years Locke devoted much of his attention to theology. His major work in this field was
The Reasonableness of Christianity, published (again anonymously) in 1695. This work was controversial
because Locke argued that many beliefs traditionally believed to be mandatory for Christians were
unnecessary. Locke argued for a highly ecumenical form of Christianity. Closer to the time of his death
Locke wrote a work on the Pauline Epistles. The work was unfinished, but published posthumously. A
short work on miracles also dates from this time and was published posthumously.

Locke suffered from health problems for most of his adult life. In particular, he had respiratory
ailments which were exacerbated by his visits to London where the air quality was very poor. His health
took a turn for the worse in 1704 and he became increasingly debilitated. He died on 28 October 1704
while Damaris Masham was reading him the Psalms. He was buried at High Laver, near Oates. He wrote
his own epitaph which was both humble and forthright.

Perspective on Self:
The Lockean Memory Theory of Personal Identity
In the history of discourse on the subject of the self and personal identity, conflicting viewpoints
have arisen. Some suggest that the self is simply the mind which thinks; others posit that the self is
identifiable with one’s body; still others claim that to even conjure an idea of the self is an impossibility.
In his Essay, Locke suggests that the self is “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection,
and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places” and continues to
define personal identity simply as “the sameness of a rational being” (Locke). So long as one is the same
self, the same rational being, one has the same personal identity.

Given this assertion, any change in the self reflects a change in personal identity, and any change in
personal identity therefore implies that the self has changed. Locke goes on to suggest that one’s personal
identity extends only so far as ones consciousness. He offers the argument that because in order to be a
self, one must be a thinking thing, and that because “consciousness always accompanies thinking” (Locke),
the self with which one personally identifies extends and persists only so far as ones consciousness. The
consciousness Locke refers to can be equated with memory.

This assumption is supported by Locke’s assertion that, “as far as [a] consciousness can be extended
backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now
as it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was
done” (Locke). More explicitly stated, if one can remember some experience, Locke’s says that one in fact
had that experience. It is by this reasoning that Locke arrives at the most controversial portion of his
theory which suggests that the converse of the previous argument is true: if one cannot remember some
experience, then one did not have that experience.

Memory is therefore, according to Locke, a necessary condition of personal identity. Referring to

states of interrupted consciousness or forgetfulness, Locke claims that, “in all these cases, our
consciousness being interrupted, and we losing sight of our past selves, doubts are raised whether we are
the same thinking thing” (Locke). An abridged version of Locke’s memory theory of personal identity
would therefore conclude that memory is both a necessary and sufficient condition of self, and, therein,
personal identity.

Sources:

Connolly, P. (n. d.). John Locke. Retrieved from https://www.iep.utm.edu/locke/

Piccirillo, R. A. (2010). "The Lockean Memory Theory of Personal Identity: Definition, Objection,
Response." Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse, 2(08). Retrieved from
http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/a?id=1683

Rogers, G. (2019, October 31). John Locke. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-

Locke
 DAVID HUME
Scottish Philosopher

Born on: Died on:

May 7, 1711 August 25, 1776
(Edinburgh, Scotland) (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Biography
David Hume was born in 1711 to a moderately wealthy family from Berwickshire Scotland, near
Edinburgh. His background was politically Whiggish and religiously Calvinistic. As a child he faithfully
attended the local Church of Scotland, pastored by his uncle. Hume was educated by his widowed mother
until he left for the University of Edinburgh at the age of eleven. His letters describe how as a young
student he took religion seriously and obediently followed a list of moral guidelines taken from The Whole
Duty of Man, a popular Calvinistic devotional.

Leaving the University of Edinburgh around the age of fifteen to pursue his education privately, he
was encouraged to consider a career in law, but his interests soon turned to philosophy. During these
years of private study he began raising serious questions about religion, as he recounts in the following
letter:

Tis not long ago that I burn’d an old Manuscript Book, wrote before I was twenty;
which contain’d, Page after Page, the gradual Progress of my Thoughts on that head [i.e.
religious belief]. It begun with an anxious Search after Arguments, to confirm the common
Opinion: Doubts stole in, dissipated, return’d, were again dissipated, return’d again [To
Gilbert Elliot of Minto, March 10, 1751].
 Although his manuscript book was destroyed, several pages of his study notes survive from his early
twenties. These show a preoccupation with proofs for God’s existence as well as atheism, particularly as
he read on these topics in classical Greek and Latin texts and in Pierre Bayle’s skeptical Historical and
Critical Dictionary. During these years of private study, some of which were in France, he composed his
three-volume Treatise of Human Nature, which was published anonymously in two installments before
he was thirty (1739, 1740). The Treatise explores several philosophical topics such as space, time,
causality, external objects, the passions, free will, and morality, offering original and often skeptical
appraisals of these notions. Book I of the Treatise was unfavorably reviewed in the History of the Works
of the Learned with a succession of sarcastic comments. Although scholars today recognized it as a
philosophical masterpiece, Hume was disappointed with the minimal interest his book spawned and said
that “It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinctions even to excite a murmur among
the zealots” (My Own Life).

In 1741 and 1742 Hume published his two-volume Essays, Moral and Political, which were written
in a popular style and were more successful than the Treatise. In 1744-1745 he was a candidate for the
Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. The Edinburgh Town Council was responsible
for electing a replacement, and critics opposed Hume by condemning his anti-religious writings. Chief
among the critics was clergyman William Wishart (d. 1752), the Principal of the University of Edinburgh.
Lists of allegedly dangerous propositions from Hume’s Treatise circulated, presumably penned by Wishart
himself. In the face of such strong opposition, the Edinburgh Town Council consulted the Edinburgh
ministers. Hoping to win over the clergy, Hume composed a point by point reply to the circulating lists of
dangerous propositions, which was published as A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh.
The clergy were not swayed, 12 of the 15 ministers voted against Hume, and he quickly withdrew his
candidacy. In 1745 Hume accepted an invitation from General St Clair to attend him as secretary. He wore
the uniform of an officer, and accompanied the general on an expedition against Canada (which ended in
an incursion on the coast of France) and to an embassy post in the courts of Vienna and Turin.

Because of the success of his Essays, Hume was convinced that the poor reception of his Treatise
was caused by its style rather than by its content. In 1748 he published his Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding, a more popular rendition of portions of Book I of the Treatise. The Enquiry also includes
two sections not found in the Treatise: “Of Miracles” and a dialogue titled “Of a Particular Providence and
of a Future State.” Each section contains direct attacks on religious belief. In 1751 he published his Enquiry
Concerning the Principles of Morals, which recasts parts of Book III of the Treatise in a very different form.
The work establishes a system of morality upon utility and human sentiments alone, and without appeal
to divine moral commands. By the end of the century Hume was recognized as the founder of the moral
theory of utility, and utilitarian political theorist Jeremy Bentham acknowledged Hume’s direct influence
upon him. The same year Hume also published his Political Discourses, which drew immediate praise and
influenced economic thinkers such as Adam Smith, William Godwin, and Thomas Malthus.

In 1751-1752 Hume sought a philosophy chair at the University of Glasgow, and was again
unsuccessful. In 1752 his new employment as librarian of the Advocate’s Library in Edinburgh provided
him with the resources to pursue his interest in history. There, he wrote much of his highly successful six-
volume History of England (published from 1754 to 1762). The first volume was unfavorably received,
partially for its defense of Charles I, and partially for two sections which attack Christianity. In one passage
Hume notes that the first Protestant reformers were fanatical or “inflamed with the highest enthusiasm”
in their opposition to Roman Catholic domination. In the second passage he labels Roman Catholicism a
superstition which “like all other species of superstition. . . rouses the vain fears of unhappy mortals.”
The most vocal attack against Hume’s History came from Daniel MacQueen in his 300 page Letters on Mr.
Hume’s History. MacQueen scrutinizes the first volume of Hume’s work, exposing all the allegedly “loose
and irreligious sneers” Hume makes against Christianity. Ultimately, this negative response led Hume to
delete the two controversial passages from succeeding editions of the History.

Around this time Hume also wrote his two most substantial works on religion: The Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion. The Natural History appeared in 1757,
but, on the advice of friends who wished to steer Hume away from religious controversy, the Dialogues
remained unpublished until 1779, three years after his death. The Natural History aroused controversy
even before it was made public. In 1756 a volume of Hume’s essays titled Five Dissertations was printed
and ready for distribution. The essays included (1) “The Natural History of Religion;” (2) “Of the Passions;”
(3) “Of Tragedy;” (4) “Of Suicide;” and (5) “Of the Immortality of the Soul.” The latter two essays made
direct attacks on common religious doctrines by defending a person’s moral right to commit suicide and
by criticizing the idea of life after death. Early copies were passed around, and Hume’s publisher was
threatened with prosecution if the book was distributed as it was. The printed copies of Five Dissertations
were then physically altered by removing the essays on suicide and immortality, and inserting a new essay
“Of the Standard of Taste” in their place. Hume also took this opportunity to alter two particularly
offending paragraphs in the Natural History. The essays were then bound with the new title Four
Dissertations and distributed in January, 1757.

In the years following Four Dissertations, Hume completed his last major literary work, The History
of England, which gave him a reputation as an historian that equaled, if not overshadowed, his reputation
as a philosopher. In 1763, at age 50, he was invited to accompany the Earl of Hertford to the embassy in
Paris, with a near prospect of being his secretary. He eventually accepted, and remarks at the reception
he received in Paris “from men and women of all ranks and stations.” He returned to Edinburgh in 1766,
and continued developing relations with the greatest minds of the time. Among these was Jean Jacques
Rousseau who in 1766 was ordered out of Switzerland by the government in Berne. Hume offered
Rousseau refuge in England and secured him a government pension. In England, Rousseau became
suspicious of plots, and publicly charged Hume with conspiring to ruin his character, under the appearance
of helping him. Hume published a pamphlet defending his actions and was exonerated. Another secretary
appointment took him away from 1767-1768. Returning again to Edinburgh, his remaining years were
spent revising and refining his published works, and socializing with friends in Edinburgh’s intellectual
circles. In 1770, fellow Scotsman James Beattie published one of the harshest attacks on Hume’s
philosophy to ever appear in print, entitled An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth in
Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism. Hume was upset by Beattie’s relentless verbal attacks against him
in the work, but the book made Beattie famous and King George III, who admired it, awarded Beattie a
pension of £200 per year.
 In 1776, at age sixty-five, Hume died from an internal disorder which had plagued him for many
months. After his death, his name took on new significance as several of his previously unpublished works
appeared. The first was a brief autobiography, My Own Life, but even this unpretentious work aroused
controversy. As his friends, Adam Smith and S.J. Pratt, published affectionate eulogies describing how he
died with no concern for an afterlife, religious critics responded by condemning this unjustifiable
admiration of Hume’s infidelity. Two years later, in 1779, Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
appeared. Again, the response was mixed. Admirers of Hume considered it a masterfully written work,
while religious critics branded it as dangerous to religion. Finally, in 1782, Hume’s two suppressed essays
on suicide and immortality were published. Their reception was almost unanimously negative.

Perspective on Self:
The Bundle Theory of the Self
This theory owes its name to Hume, who described the self or person (which he assumed to be the
mind) as ’nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an
inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’ (A Treatise of Human Nature I, IV, §VI).
The theory begins by denying Descartes’s Second Meditation view that experiences belong to an
immaterial soul; its distinguishing feature is its attempt to account for the unity of a single mind by
employing only relations among the experiences themselves rather than their attribution to an
independently persisting subject. The usual objection to the bundle theory is that no relations adequate
to the task can be found. But empirical work suggests that the task itself may be illusory.

Many bundle theorists follow Hume in taking their topic to be personal identity. But the theory can
be disentangled from this additional burden.

Hume asks us to consider what impression gives us our concept of self. We tend to think of
ourselves as selves—stable entities that exist over time. But no matter how closely we examine our own
experiences, we never observe anything beyond a series of transient feelings, sensations, and
impressions. We cannot observe ourselves, or what we are, in a unified way. There is no impression of
the “self” that ties our particular impressions together. In other words, we can never be directly aware of
ourselves, only of what we are experiencing at any given moment. Although the relations between our
ideas, feelings, and so on, may be traced through time by memory, there is no real evidence of any core
that connects them. This argument also applies to the concept of the soul. Hume suggests that the self is
just a bundle of perceptions, like links in a chain. To look for a unifying self beyond those perceptions is
like looking for a chain apart from the links that constitute it. Hume argues that our concept of the self is
a result of our natural habit of attributing unified existence to any collection of associated parts. This belief
is natural, but there is no logical support for it.

Regarding the issue of personal identity, (1) Hume’s skeptical claim is that we have no experience
of a simple, individual impression that we can call the self—where the “self” is the totality of a person’s
conscious life. He writes, “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always
stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or
pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but
the perception” (Treatise, 1.4.6.3). (2) Even though my perceptions are fleeting and I am a bundle of
different perceptions, I nevertheless have some idea of personal identity, and that must be accounted for
(Treatise, 1.4.6.4). Because of the associative principles, the resemblance or causal connection within the
chain of my perceptions gives rise to an idea of myself, and memory extends this idea past my immediate
perceptions (Treatise, 1.4.6.18 ff.). (3) A common abuse of the notion of personal identity occurs when
the idea of a soul or unchanging substance is added to give us a stronger or more unified concept of the
self (Treatise, 1.4.6.6).

Sources:

Candlish, S. (1998). Mind, bundle theory of. In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Taylor and
Francis. Retrieved from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/mind-bundle-theory-
of/v-1. doi:10.4324/9780415249126-V008-1

Cranston, M. , Jessop, T.E. (2019, August 21). David Hume. Retrieved from
https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Hume

Fieser, J. (n. d.). David Hume. Retrieved from https://www.iep.utm.edu/hume/#SH3e

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on David Hume (1711–1776).” SparkNotes LLC. 2005. Retrieved from
http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/hume/
 PAUL CHURCHLAND
Canadian Philosopher

Born on:
October 21, 1942
(Vancouver, Canada)

Biography
Paul Montgomery Churchland was born on October 21, 1942 in Vancouver, Canada.

He attended the University of British Columbia, from where he received a degree in Bachelor of
Arts in 1964. Later, he the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and received a Ph.D. in 1969.
With American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars as his advisor, his dissertation during the Ph.D. was "Persons
and P-Predicates."

While working towards his Ph.D., Churchland taught philosophy at the University of Toronto from
1967–69. After receiving the degree in 1969, he began teaching at the University of Manitoba in Manitoba,
Canada, as Assistant Professor. In 1974, he was promoted to Associate Professor and in 1979, he became
a full professor. After working with the University of Toronto for fifteen years, in 1984, he accepted the
"Valtz Family Endowed Chair" in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, California (UCSD,)
within the Institute for Neural Computation and its Cognitive Science Faculty. He has since been working
with UCSD.

He remained on the Valtz Family Endowed Chair in Philosophy through 2011. In the years 1986-
1990, he also served as Department Chair at the university.
 In February 2017, Churchland became a Professor Emeritus at UCSD and also a member of the
Board of Trustees of the Center for Consciousness Studies of the Philosophy Department, Moscow State
University. He continues to appear as a philosophy faculty member on the UCSD Interdisciplinary Ph.D.
Program in Cognitive Science and with the affiliated faculty of the UCSD Institute for Neural Computation.

Churchland cites as his influence the works of American philosophers, W. V. O. Quine, Thomas Kuhn,
Russell Hanson, Wilfred Sellars, and Austrian-American philosopher, Paul Feyerabend. His areas of
interest are: epistemology, perception, philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, philosophy
of neuroscience, and philosophy of science. He has authored numerous books on philosophy, including,
Matter and Consciousness, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, and Neurophilosophy at Work.

Churchland is married to Canadian-American analytical philosopher, Patricia Churchland. Paul met

Patricia when they were enrolled in a class on Plato at the University of Pittsburgh. They married after
Patricia completed her B.Phil at Oxford University. The couple has two children: Mark Churchland (born
1972) and Anne Churchland (born 1974) –– both neuroscientists.

Mark is Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Columbia University, New York. His research revolves
around how the brain controls voluntary movement, and focuses on questions such as: how does the
brain prepare and generate voluntary movement? What is the key event that triggers a movement, and
in doing so turns thought into action? Can we reduce the problem of movement generation to a problem
of characterizing the neural dynamics that are necessary to generate muscle activity? If so, how should
we then think of upstream ‘cognitive’ processes that determine which movement to make and when to
make it?

Anne is a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York. Her research focused on the
function of the posterior parietal cortex in cognitive processes such as decision-making and multisensory
integration.

Perspective on Self:
Eliminative Materialism
Humans have known since recorded history of the close, intimate relationship between the mind
and the body. The health of our bodies, the things we ingest, the experiences we endure—all of these
dimensions of our physical self have a profound effect on our mental and emotional functioning. Similarly,
our emotional states, the way we think about things, our levels of stress, the optimism (or pessimism) we
feel—all of these dimensions of our mental self have a dramatic impact on our physical condition. As an
example, just consider how the single word heart is used to display this intimate connection between the
emotional and the physical: heartfelt, heartache, heartsick, heartened, large-hearted, heartless,
lighthearted, hard-hearted, faint-hearted, heartbroken.

Modern science is now able to use advanced equipment and sophisticated techniques to unravel
and articulate the complex web of connections that binds consciousness and body together into an
integrated self. In fact, one of the most dynamic areas of scientific research currently is that devoted to
exploring the mind-brain relationship, and the information being developed is fascinating. Scientists are
increasingly able to correlate specific areas in the brain with areas of mental functioning, both cognitively
and emotionally. Psychotropic drugs are being developed that can influence emotional states such as
depression or extreme social anxiety. Brain scans can reveal physical abnormalities that are related to
personality disorders. And discoveries are being made in the reverse direction as well, detailing the
physical effects of emotional states such as anxiety, depression, anger, pessimism, and optimism on the
health and well-being of the body. The assumption of this approach is that to fully understand the nature
of the mind we have to fully understand the nature of the brain.

The impressive success of such scientific mind-brain research has encouraged many to conclude
that it is only a matter of time before the mental life of consciousness is fully explainable in terms of the
neurophysiology of the brain. The ultimate goal of such explorations is to link the self—including all of our
thoughts, passions, personality traits—to the physical wiring and physiological functioning of the brain.
Although such thinkers recognize that achieving such a goal will take time, they are confident that we will
progressively develop ways of describing the mind, consciousness, and human experience that are
physiologically based. The contemporary philosopher Paul Churchland articulates such a vision in the
following essay. He begins by acknowledging that a simple identity formula—mental states = brain
states—is a flawed way in which to conceptualize the relationship between the mind and the brain.
Instead, we need to develop a new, neuroscience-based vocabulary that will enable us to think and
communicate clearly about the mind, consciousness, and human experience. He refers to this view as
eliminative materialism.

Churchland’s central argument is that the concepts and theoretical vocabulary we use to think
about our selves—using such terms as belief, desire, fear, sensation, pain, joy—actually misrepresent the
reality of minds and selves. All of these concepts are part of a commonsense “folk psychology” that
obscures rather than clarifies the nature of human experience. Eliminative materialists believe that we
need to develop a new vocabulary and conceptual framework that is grounded in neuroscience and that
will be a more accurate reflection of the human mind and self. Churchland proceeds to state the
arguments that he believes support his position.

Churchland’s point is that the most compelling argument for developing a new conceptual
framework and vocabulary founded on neuroscience is the simple fact that the current “folk psychology”
has done a poor job in accomplishing the main reason for its existence—explaining and predicting the
commonplace phenomena of the human mind and experience. And in the same way that science replaces
outmoded, ineffective, and limited conceptual frameworks with ones that can explain and predict more
effectively, so the same thing needs to be done in psychology and philosophy of mind. This new
conceptual framework will be based on and will integrate all that we are learning about how the brain
works on a neurological level.

Although he believes strongly in the logic of his position, Churchland recognizes that many people
will resist the argument he is making for a variety of reasons.

Churchland’s ultimate concession that the psychology-based conceptual framework currently used
by most academic disciplines and popular culture may not end up being completely eradicated and
replaced by a neuroscience framework still operates within his physicalist framework: for those “folk
psychology” terms not eliminated will nevertheless be reducible to neurophysical statements of brain
states.

Of course, there are many people who believe that there are fundamental differences between the
life of the mind and neuroscientific descriptions of the brain’s operation. Many people believe that, no
matter how exhaustively scientists are able to describe the physical conditions for consciousness, this
does not mean that the mental dimensions of the self will ever be reducible to these physical states. Why?
Because in the final analysis, the physical and mental dimensions of the self are qualitatively different
realms, each with its own distinctive vocabulary, logic, and organizing principles. According to this view,
even if scientists were able to map out your complete brain activity at the moment you were having an
original idea or experiencing an emotional epiphany, that neurobiological description of your brain would
provide no clue as to the nature of your personal experience at that moment. Articulating and
communicating the rich texture of those experiences would take a very different language and logic.

Fascinatingly, it was Socrates who first articulated a coherent critique of the materialist position in
Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, during the period following his trial and conviction. Socrates ridicules the
materialist position, which he attributes to the philosopher Anaxagoras, which, he says, would explain his
decision to remain in Athens by reference to his “bones and sinews,” rather than the result of the
conscious choice of his mind. With surprisingly good humor he explains that if it was up to his body he
would not have remained in Athens to be executed, but rather “I fancy that these sinews and bones would
have been in the neighborhood of Megara or Boeotia long ago—impelled by a conviction of what is best!—
if I did not think that it was more right and honorable to submit to whatever my country orders rather
than to take to my heels and run away.” In other words, Socrates is arguing that it is his conscious, rational
mind that has determined his fate, and attempting to use a materialistic framework to explain his actions
makes no sense. “If it were said that without such bones and sinews and all the rest of them I should not
be able to do what I think is right, it would be true. But to say that it is because of them that I do what I
am doing, and not through choice of what is best—although my actions are controlled by mind—would
be a very lax and inaccurate form of expression.” For Socrates, even if we had a complete description of
how the body (and by extension the brain) worked, we would still be unable to dispense with folk
psychological terms such as choice and belief.

Sources:

Paul Churchland: Canadian Philosopher (n. d.). David Hume. Retrieved from
https://peoplepill.com/people/paul-churchland/

The Self Is the Brain: Physicalism (n. d.). Retrieved from

https://revelpreview.pearson.com/epubs/pearson_chaffee/OPS/xhtml/ch03_sec_10.xhtml
 MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
French Phenomenological Philosopher

Born on: Died on:

March 14, 1908 May 3, 1961
(Rochefort) (Paris, France)

Biography
After the death in 1913 of his father, a colonial artillery captain and a knight of the Legion of Honor,
he moved with his family to Paris. He would later describe his childhood as incomparably happy, and he
remained very close to his mother until her death in 1953. Merleau-Ponty pursued secondary studies at
the Parisian lycees Janson-de-Sailly and Louis-le-Grand, completing his first course in philosophy at
Janson-de-Sailly with Gustave Rodrigues in 1923–24. He won the school’s “Award for Outstanding
Achievement” in philosophy that year and would later trace his commitment to the vocation of philosophy
to this first course. He was also awarded “First Prize in Philosophy” at Louis-le-Grand in 1924–25. He
attended the École Normale Supérieure from 1926 to 1930, where he befriended Simone de Beauvoir and
Claude Lévi-Straus. Some evidence suggests that, during these years, Merleau-Ponty authored a novel,
Nord. Récit de l’arctique, under the pseudonym Jacques Heller (Alloa 2013b). His professors at ENS
included Léon Brunschvicg and Émile Bréhier, the latter supervising his research on Plotinus for the
Diplôme d’études supérieures in 1929. Bréhier would continue to supervise Merleau-Ponty’s research
through the completion of his two doctoral dissertations in 1945. During his student years, Merleau-Ponty
attended Husserl’s 1929 Sorbonne lectures and Georges Gurvitch’s 1928–1930 courses on German
philosophy. He received the agrégation in philosophy in 1930, ranking in second place.
 After a year of mandatory military service, Merleau-Ponty taught at the lycee in Beauvais from 1931
to 1933, pursued a year of research on perception funded by a subvention from the Caisse nationale des
sciences (the precursor of today’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique) in 1933–34, and taught at
the lycee in Chartres in 1934–35. From 1935 to 1940, he was a tutor (agégé-répétiteur) at the École
Normale Supérieure, where his primary duty was to prepare students for the agrégation. During this
period, he attended Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel and Aron Gurwitsch’s lectures on Gestalt
psychology. His first publications also appeared during these years, as a series of review essays on Max
Scheler’s Ressentiment (1935), Gabriel Marcel’s Being and Having (1936), and Sartre’s Imagination (1936).
In 1938, he completed his thèse complémentaire, originally titled Conscience et comportement
[Consciousness and Behavior] and published in 1942 as La structure du comportement [The Structure of
Behavior, SC]. He was the first outside visitor to the newly established Husserl Archives in Louvain,
Belgium, in April 1939, where he met Eugen Fink and consulted Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts,
including Ideen II and later sections of Die Krisis.

With the outbreak of World War Two, Merleau-Ponty served for a year as lieutenant in the 5th
Infantry Regiment and 59th Light Infantry Division, until he was wounded in battle in June 1940, days
before the signing of the armistice between France and Germany. He was awarded the Croix de guerre,
recognizing bravery in combat. After several months of convalescence, he returned to teaching at the
Lycée Carnot in Paris, where he remained from 1940 until 1944. In November 1940, he married Suzanne
Jolibois, and their daughter Marianne was born in June 1941. In the winter of 1940–41, Merleau-Ponty
renewed his acquaintance with Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he had met as a student at the École Normale,
through their involvement in the resistance group Socialisme et Liberté. The group published around ten
issues of an underground review until the arrest of two members in early 1942 led to its dissolution. After
the conclusion of the war, in 1945, Merleau-Ponty would collaborate with Sartre and Beauvoir to found
Les Temps Modernes, a journal devoted to “littérature engagée”, for which he served as political editor
until 1952.

At the end of the 1943–44 school year, Merleau-Ponty completed his main thesis, Phénoménologie
de la perception [Phenomenology of Perception, PP], and in 1944–45 he taught at the Lycée Condorcet in
Paris, replacing Sartre during the latter’s leave from this position. Merleau-Ponty defended his two
dissertations in July 1945, fulfilling the requirements for the Docteur ès lettres, which was awarded “with
distinction”. In October 1945, Les Temps Modernes published its inaugural issue; Merleau-Ponty was a
founding member of the journal’s governing board, managed its daily affairs, and penned many of its
editorials that were signed simply “T.M.”, even though he refused to allow his name to be printed on the
cover alongside Sartre’s as the review’s Director. That fall, Merleau-Ponty was appointed to the post of
Maître de conférences in Psychology at the University of Lyon, where he was promoted to the rank of
Professor in the Chair of Psychology in 1948. From 1947 to 1949, he also taught supplementary courses
at the École Normale Supérieure, where his students included the young Michel Foucault. Student notes
(taken by Jean Deprun) from Merleau-Ponty’s 1947–48 course on “The Union of the Soul and the Body in
Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson”—a course that he taught at both Lyon and E.N.S. to prepare students
for the agrégation and which was attended by Foucault—were published in 1968.
 In 1947, Merleau-Ponty participated regularly in the Collège philosophique, an association formed
by Jean Wahl to provide an open venue for intellectual exchange without the academic formality of the
Sorbonne, and frequented by many leading Parisian thinkers. Merleau-Ponty published his first book of
political philosophy in 1947, Humanisme et terreur, essai sur le problème communiste [Humanism and
Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, 1969, HT], in which he responded to the developing
opposition between liberal democracies and communism by cautioning a “wait-and-see” attitude toward
Marxism. A collection of essays concerning the arts, philosophy, and politics, Sens et non-sense [Sense
and Non-Sense, 1996b/1964], appeared in 1948. In the fall of 1948, Merleau-Ponty delivered a series of
seven weekly lectures on French national radio that were subsequently published as Causeries 1948.

Merleau-Ponty declined an invitation to join the Department of Philosophy at the University of

Chicago as a Visiting Professor in 1948–49, but instead received a leave from Lyon for the year to present
a series of lectures at the University of Mexico in early 1949. Later in 1949, Merleau-Ponty was appointed
Professor of Child Psychology and Pedagogy at the University of Paris, and in this position lectured widely
on child development, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, and anthropology. His eight
courses from the Sorbonne are known from compiled student notes reviewed by him and published in
the Sorbonne’s Bulletin de psychologie. Merleau-Ponty held this position for three years until his election,
in 1952, to the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France, the most prestigious post for a philosopher
in France, which he would hold until his death in 1961. At forty-four, Merleau-Ponty was the youngest
person ever elected to this position, but his appointment was not without controversy. Rather than
following the typical procedure of ratifying the vote of the General Assembly of Professors, who had
selected Merleau-Ponty as their lead candidate, the Académie des sciences morales et politiques made
the unprecedented decision to remove his name from the list of candidates; the Académie’s decision was
subsequently overturned by the Minister of Education himself, who allowed the faculty vote in favor of
Merleau-Ponty to stand. Merleau-Ponty’s January 1953 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France was
published under the title Éloge de la Philosophie [In Praise of Philosophy, 1953/1963]. Many of his courses
from the Collège de France have subsequently been published, based either on student notes or Merleau-
Ponty’s own lecture notes.

In the face of growing political disagreements with Sartre set in motion by the Korean War,
Merleau-Ponty resigned his role as political editor of Les Temps Modernes in December of 1952 and
withdrew from the editorial board altogether in 1953. His critique of Sartre’s politics became public in
1955 with Les Aventures de la dialectique [Adventures of the Dialectic, 1973 AdD], in which Merleau-
Ponty distanced himself from revolutionary Marxism and sharply criticized Sartre for “ultrabolshevism”.
Beauvoir’s equally biting rebuttal, “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism”, published the same year in
Les Temps Modernes, accuses Merleau-Ponty of willfully misrepresenting Sartre’s position, opening a rift
between the three former friends that would never entirely heal. Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual circle
during his years at the Collège de France included Lévi-Straus and Jacques Lacan, and for several years he
was a regular contributor to the popular weekly magazine L’Express. In October and November 1955, on
a commission from Alliance française, Merleau-Ponty visited several African countries, including Tunisia,
French Equatorial Africa, the Belgian Congo, and Kenya, where he delivered a series of lectures on the
concept of race, colonialism, and development. In 1956, he published Les Philosophes célèbres [Famous
Philosophers], a large edited volume of original introductions to key historical and contemporary thinkers
(beginning, interestingly, with philosophers from India and China) whose contributors included Gilles
Deleuze, Gilbert Ryle, Alfred Schutz, and Jean Starobinski. In April 1957, Merleau-Ponty declined to accept
induction into France’s Order of the Legion of Honor, presumably in protest over the inhumane actions of
the Fourth Republic, including the use of torture, during the Battle of Algiers. In October and November
of 1957, as his second commission from Alliance française, he lectured in Madagascar, Reunion Island,
and Mauritius, citing as a primary motivation for accepting the commission his desire to see first-hand the
effects of reforms in French policies governing overseas territories. The last book Merleau-Ponty
published during his lifetime, Signes [Signs, 1960/1964], appearing in 1960, collecting essays on art,
language, the history of philosophy, and politics that spanned more than a decade. His last published
essay, “L’Œil et l’esprit” [“Eye and Mind”, 1964a OEE] addressing the ontological implications of painting,
appeared in the 1961 inaugural issue of Art de France. Merleau-Ponty died of a heart attack in Paris on
May 3rd, 1961, at the age of 53, with Descartes’ Optics open on his desk.

Merleau-Ponty’s friend and former student Claude Lefort published two of his teacher’s unfinished
manuscripts posthumously: La prose du monde [The Prose of the World, 1969/1973], an exploration of
literature and expression drafted in 1950–51 and apparently abandoned; and Le visible et l’invisible [The
Visible and the Invisible, 1968 V&I], a manuscript and numerous working notes from 1959–1961 that
present elements of Merleau-Ponty’s mature ontology. The latter manuscript was apparently part of a
larger project, Être et Monde [Being and World], for which two additional unpublished sections were
substantially drafted in 1957–1958: La Nature ou le monde du silence [Nature or the World of Silence]
and Introduction à l’ontologie [Introduction to Ontology] (Saint Aubert 2013: 28).[3] These manuscripts,
along with many of Merleau-Ponty’s other unpublished notes and papers, were donated to the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France by Suzanne Merleau-Ponty in 1992 and are available for consultation
by scholars.

An article published in French newspaper Le Monde in October 2014 makes the case of recent
discoveries about Merleau-Ponty's likely authorship of the novel Nord. Récit de l'arctique (Grasset, 1928).
Convergent sources from close friends (Beauvoir, Elisabeth "Zaza" Lacoin) seem to leave little doubt that
Jacques Heller was a pseudonym of the 20-year-old Merleau-Ponty.

Merleau-Ponty taught first at the Lycée de Beauvais (1931–33) and then got a fellowship to do
research from the Caisse nationale de la recherche scientifique. From 1934–1935 he taught at the Lycée
de Chartres. He then in 1935 became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was awarded his
doctorate on the basis of two important books: La structure du comportement (1942) and
Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945).

After teaching at the University of Lyon from 1945 to 1948, Merleau-Ponty lectured on child
psychology and education at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952.[23] He was awarded the Chair of
Philosophy at the Collège de France from 1952 until his death in 1961, making him the youngest person
to have been elected to a Chair.

Besides his teaching, Merleau-Ponty was also political editor for the leftist Les Temps modernes
from the founding of the journal in October 1945 until December 1952. In his youth he had read Karl
Marx's writings[24] and Sartre even claimed that Merleau-Ponty converted him to Marxism.[25] While he
was not a member of the French Communist Party and did not identify as a Communist, he laid out an
argument justifying the Soviet show trials and violence for progressive ends in general in the work
Humanism and Terror in 1947. However, about three years later, he renounced his earlier support for
political violence, and he rejected Marxism and advocated a liberal left position in Adventures of the
Dialectic (1955).[26] His friendship with Sartre and work with Les Temps modernes ended because of that,
since Sartre still had a more favourable attitude towards Soviet communism. Merleau-Ponty was
subsequently active in the French non-communist left and in particular in the Union of the Democratic
Forces.

Merleau-Ponty died suddenly of a stroke in 1961 at age 53, apparently while preparing for a class
on René Descartes, leaving an unfinished manuscript which was posthumously published in 1964, along
with a selection of Merleau-Ponty's working notes, by Claude Lefort as The Visible and the Invisible. He is
buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Perspective of Self:
The Self Is Embodied Subjectivity

In a radical break from traditional theories of the mind, the German thinker Edmund Husserl*
introduced a very different approach that came to be known as phenomenology. Phenomenology refers
to the conviction that all knowledge of our selves and our world is based on the “phenomena” of
experience. From Husserl’s standpoint, the division between the “mind” and the “body” is a product of
confused thinking. The simple fact is, we experience our self as a unity in which the mental and physical
are seamlessly woven together. This idea of the self as a unity thus fully rejects the dualist ideas of Plato
and Descartes.

A generation after Husserl, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty* articulated the

phenomenologist position in a simple declaration: “I live in my body.” By the “lived body,” Merleau-Ponty
means an entity that can never be objectified or known in a completely objective sort of way, as opposed
to the “body as object” of the dualists. Note that at no point do you doubt that the “I” you refer to is a
single integrated entity, a blending of mental, physical, and emotional structured around a core identity:
your self. It’s only later, when you’re reading Descartes or discussing the possibility of reincarnation with
a friend that you begin creating ideas such as independent “minds,” “bodies,” “souls,” or, in the case of
Freud, an “unconscious.”

According to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, if we honestly and accurately examine our direct and
immediate experience of our selves, these mind-body “problems” fall away. As Merleau-Ponty explains,
“There is not a duality of substances but only the dialectic of living being in its biological milieu.” In other
words, our “living body” is a natural synthesis of mind and biology, and any attempts to divide them into
separate entities are artificial and nonsensical.

The underlying question is “What aspect of our experience is the most ‘real’?” From Husserl’s and
Merleau-Ponty’s vantage point, it’s the moments of immediate, prereflective experience that are the
most real. It is the Lebenswelt or “lived world,” which is the fundamental ground of our being and
consciousness. To take another example, consider your experience when you are in the midst of activities
such as dancing, playing a sport, or performing musically—what is your experience of your self? Most
likely, you’re completely absorbed in the moment, your mind and body functioning as one integrated
entity. For Merleau-Ponty, this unified experience of your self is the paradigm or model you should use to
understand your nature.

Phenomenologists do not assume that there are more “fundamental” levels of reality beyond that
of conscious human experience. Consistent with this ontological (having to do with the nature of being or
existence) commitment is the belief that explanations for human behavior and experience are not to be
sought by appeal to phenomena that are somehow behind, beneath, or beyond the phenomena of lived
human experience but instead are to be sought within the field of human experience itself, using
terminology and concepts appropriate to this field. And when we examine our selves at this fundamental
level of direct human experience, we discover that our mind and body are unified, not separate. It is this
primal consciousness, Merleau-Ponty notes in his book Phenomenology of Perception, that is the
foundation for our perception of the world and our knowledge about it:

Consciousness must be reckoned as a self-contained system of Being, as a system of Absolute being,

into which nothing can penetrate and from which nothing can escape. On the other side, the whole spatio-
temporal world, to which man and the human ego claim to belong as subordinate singular realities, is
according to its own meaning mere intentional Being, a Being, therefore, which has the merely secondary,
relative sense of a Being for a consciousness.

For Merleau-Ponty, everything that we are aware of—and can possibly know—is contained within
our own consciousness. It’s impossible for us to get “outside” of our consciousness because it defines the
boundaries of our personal universe. The so-called real world of objects existing in space and time initially
exists only as objects of my consciousness. Yet in a cognitive sleight-of-hand, we act as if the space-time
world is primary and our immediate consciousness is secondary. This is an inversion of the way things
actually are: It is our consciousness that is primary and the space-time world that is secondary, existing
fundamentally as the object of our consciousness.

Nor is science exempt from condemnation, according to the phenomenologists, for scientists are
guilty of the same flawed thinking as expressed in abstract philosophical and religious theories. Too often
scientists treat their abstract theories as if they take precedence over the rich and intuitive reality of
immediate lived experience. In cases when the two worlds conflict, scientists automatically assume that
the scientific perspective is correct, and the direct experience of the individual wrong. This is the difficulty
we pointed out with the concept of the unconscious: It was considered by Freud and many of his followers
to be of such supreme authority that no individual’s contrasting point of view can measure up to the
ultimate truth of the unconscious interpretation. In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty
makes the crucial point that these theories couldn’t even exist without the primal reality of lived
experience to serve as their foundation. And then these theories have the arrogance to dismiss this
fundamental reality as somehow secondary or derivative:

Scientific points of view are always both naïve and at the same time dishonest, because they take
for granted without explicitly mentioning it, that other point of view, namely that of the consciousness,
through which from the outset a world forms itself around me and begins to exist for me.
 As a philosophical theory of knowledge, phenomenology is distinctive in the sense that its goal is
not to explain experience but rather to clarify our understanding of it. A phenomenologist like Merleau-
Ponty sees his aim of describing what he sees and then assuming that his description will strike a familiar
chord with us, stimulating us to say, “I understand what you’re saying—that makes sense to me!” From
this perspective, the responsibility of philosophy is not to provide explanations but to seek the root and
genesis of meaning, “to reveal the mystery of the world and of reason,” to help us think and see things
more clearly. For example, to develop a clear understanding of your “being in love,” you need to delay
using elaborate psychological theories and instead begin by describing the phenomena of the experience
in a clear, vivid fashion, trying to uncover the meaning of what you are experiencing. Then you can begin
developing concepts and theories to help you make sense of the phenomena of “being in love.” The
danger of using theories prematurely is that you may very well distort your actual experience, forcing it
to conform to someone else’s idea of what “being in love” means instead of clearly understanding your
unique experience. Concepts and theories are essential for understanding our selves and our world. It’s
simply a question of which comes first—the concepts and theories or the phenomena of experience that
the concepts and theories are designed to explain. For phenomenologists, it’s essential that we always
begin (and return regularly to) the phenomena of our lived experience. Otherwise, we run the risk of
viewing our experience through conceptual or theoretical “lenses” that distort rather than clarify. For
instance, in providing a phenomenological analysis of “being in love,” you might begin by describing
precisely what your immediate responses are: physically, emotionally, cognitively. I’m currently in love
and,

I feel . . .
I think . . .
My physical response . . .
I spontaneously . . .

By recording the direct phenomena of our experience, we have the basic data needed to reveal the
complex meaning of this experience and begin to develop a clearer understanding of what “being in love”
is all about, by using concepts and theories appropriate to the reality of our lived experience.

What exactly is “consciousness”? For Merleau-Ponty it is a dynamic form responsible for actively
structuring our conscious ideas and physical behavior. In this sense, it is fundamentally different from
Hume’s and Locke’s concept of the mind as a repository for sensations or the behaviorists’ notion of the
mind as the sum total of the reactions to the physical stimuli that an organism receives. Consciousness,
for Merleau-Ponty, is a dimension of our lived body, which is not an object in the world, distinct from the
knowing subject (as in Descartes), but is the subjects’ own point of view on the world: The body is itself
the original knowing subject from which all other forms of knowledge derive.

Accomplished writers often have a special talent for representing human experience in a rich,
vibrant, and textured way. The French novelist Marcel Proust* is renowned for articulating the
phenomena of consciousness in a very phenomenological way. Consider the following descriptions of
experiences and analyze their effectiveness from a phenomenological perspective on the self.
Sources:

Toadvine, T. (2016, September 14). Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Retrieved November 16, 2019, from
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/.

(n.d.). Retrieved November 16, 2019, from https://study.com/academy/lesson/merleau-ponty-the-self-

as-embodied-subjectivity.html.
(n.d.). Retrieved November 16, 2019, from
https://revelpreview.pearson.com/epubs/pearson_chaffee/OPS/xhtml/ch03_sec_11.xhtml.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (2019, November 13). Retrieved November 16, 2019, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty.
 IMMANUEL KANT
Prussian German Philosopher
Born on: Died on:
April 22, 1724 February 12, 1804
(Konigsberg, Prussia) (Konigsberg, Prussia)

Biography
Immanuel Kant was the fourth of nine children born to Johann Georg Cant, a harness maker, and
Anna Regina Cant. Later in his life, Immanuel changed the spelling of his name to Kantto to adhere to
German spelling practices. Both parents were devout followers of Pietism, an 18th-century branch of the
Lutheran Church. Seeing the potential in the young man, a local pastor arranged for the young Kant's
education. While at school, Kant gained a deep appreciation for the Latin classics.

In 1740, Kant enrolled at the University of Konigsberg as a theology student, but was soon attracted
to mathematics and physics. In 1746, his father died and he was forced to leave the university to help his
family. For a decade, he worked as a private tutor for the wealthy. During this time he published several
papers dealing with scientific questions exploring the middle ground between rationalism and empiricism.

In 1755, Immanuel Kant returned to the University of Konigsberg to continue his education. That
same year he received his doctorate of philosophy. For the next 15 years, he worked as a lecturer and
tutor and wrote major works on philosophy. In 1770, he became a full professor at the University of
Konigsberg, teaching metaphysics and logic.

In 1781, Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason, an enormous work and one of the
most important on Western thought. He attempted to explain how reason and experiences interact with
thought and understanding. This revolutionary proposal explained how an individual’s mind organizes
experiences into understanding the way the world works.

Kant focused on ethics, the philosophical study of moral actions. He proposed a moral law called
the “categorical imperative,” stating that morality is derived from rationality and all moral judgments are
rationally supported. What is right is right and what is wrong is wrong; there is no grey area. Human beings
are obligated to follow this imperative unconditionally if they are to claim to be moral.

Though the Critique of Pure Reason received little attention at the time, Kant continued to refine
his theories in a series of essays that comprised the Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgement.
Kant continued to write on philosophy until shortly before his death. In his last years, he became
embittered due to his loss of memory. He died in 1804 at age 80.

Perspective of Self
Kant on Self-Consciousness

Empirical Apperception
‘That which determines the inner sense is the understanding and its original faculty of combining
the manifold of intuition, i.e., of bringing it under an apperception’. This remark introduces to the reader
the idea that the determination of the inner sense by the understanding is done by means of an initial,
original, combining. We shall see that this combining uses a type of memory which therefore is antecedent
to inner sense, for it cannot be derived therefrom. Inner sense will thereby be determined as an intuition
of a manifold of objects (rather than being an intuition of a manifold of objects).

Inner sense alone represents the form of intuitions, i.e., in time. However, inner sense alone,
therefore, cannot be aware of (understand) this succession – it is the succession. The understanding is
therefore required for this awareness. Further, to be aware of succession means to be aware of the
moments in succession – to be aware merely of one moment, and then the next, with no link, is not to be
aware of succession, but of successors. Inner sense being succession (time) therefore requires an
understanding of this whole. To be aware of moments linked, rather than moments per se, would thus be
an understanding of inner sense. In other words, the manifold must be combined for the determination
of inner sense. Moreover, this combining must be one of memory and synthesis: to link moments means
to remember the moments past, and then synthesize them. Kant calls this original action of the
understanding on the inner sense the transcendental synthesis of the imagination (or synthesis speciosa).

Imagination is the word Kant uses for this type of memory: ‘Imagination is the faculty for
representing an object even without its presence in intuition.’ Synthesis is the a priori act of combining
representations (i.e., representations are not combined a posteriori – they do not in themselves contain
the link to other representations). Synthesis speciosa is transcendental because, first, it is as mentioned a
priori, second, it is a condition of knowledge. Kant also calls synthesis speciosa the productive imagination
to distinguish it from the merely reproductive imagination. The latter is merely the memory of association,
or recollection; it does not produce the possibility of knowledge but only reproduces what has already
been known. Since the latter does not belong to transcendental philosophy, I will henceforth refer to the
former when I use the word ‘imagination.’
 Now the understanding of the inner sense through synthesis speciosa is a ‘subjective unity of
consciousness, which is a determination of inner sense, through which that manifold of intuition is
empirically given for such a combination.’ Kant needs to define this understanding as a subjective unity in
order to distinguish it from an objective unity of consciousness. It is subjective because the intuition it
receives empirically (i.e., as the objects of the intuition of inner sense, not the a priori forms of intuition
which are universal), which it synthesises as its self-determination, are contingent on the empirical
circumstances of each person. The unity is not one which is universal for every self and thus not objective,
but one which is particular to every self and is thus subjective. Apperception means the determination of
the self; the determination that is synthesis speciosa is therefore called empirical apperception.

It should be noted that although empirical apperception is the everyday self-consciousness that is
contingent on empirical circumstance and therefore subjective, its method, the transcendental synthesis
of imagination, is universal to all. Its content (of objects) is subjective. Everyone has the imagination, but
everyone applies it differently.

The determination of inner sense is therefore an act of the understanding (synthesis speciosa)
which is empirical apperception. This is the ordinary self-consciousness that is subjective to each person
and thus dealt with in psychology. It is a cognition of the self as appearance (as inner sense), not a
cognition of the self as it would be in-itself – its intuition is appearance, inner sense, not an intuition of
the transcendental condition of appearance (which would not be sensible). As Kant states, ‘the
determination of my existence can only occur in correspondence with the form of inner sense [synthesis
speciosa], according to the particular way in which the manifold that I combine is given in inner intuition,
and I therefore have no cognition of myself as I am, but only as I appear to myself.’ Empirical apperception
is a cognition of the self as appearance, it is not the appearance itself (as is the undetermined self of inner
sense).

This explication of empirical apperception has, however, posed two other questions: what is the
objective unity of self-consciousness which he draws in distinction to the subjective unity, and can we
cognise our self as we are in ourselves? The answer to the first question is, to be concise, pure
apperception; we will find that its explication answers the latter question, concluding with the necessary
exposition of intellectual intuition.

Pure Apperception and the ‘I think’

Apperception is the subjective unity of consciousness because its object (the self) is not the
condition for objects. If something is the condition for objects it is called objective – as transcendental
and therefore universal to all selves. The self of empirical apperception is not transcendental but empirical
– therefore subjective. Consequently the objective unity of self-consciousness must be transcendental,
not being determined a posteriori but a priori (therefore pure as opposed to empirical).

What then is the condition for an object, bar the pure forms of sensible intuition already explained?
First, these intuitions must be united under a concept. But this is not possible without that manifold of
intuition already being presupposed as generally united. Per se, the intuitions are not united. This unity
cannot be synthesised by synthesis speciosa because, as quoted, imagination is ‘the faculty for
representing an object even without its presence’. That is to say, synthesis speciosa presupposes objects.
Therefore even empirical apperception is conditioned upon a higher synthesis, one which must be pure
(it cannot be determined empirically, which empirical apperception is): ‘[a] pure synthesis of the
understanding … grounds a priori the empirical synthesis.’ This pure synthesis Kant calls synthesis
intellectualis.

‘The transcendental unity of apperception is that unity through which all of the manifold given in
an intuition is united in a concept of the object. It is called objective on that account, and must be
distinguished from the subjective unity of consciousness’. The transcendental unity of apperception, or
pure apperception, is thus that a priori unity which grounds the possibility of objects. Thus it makes
empirical apperception possible as the subsequent subjective synthesis of objects. But we shall find that
it also conditions it in a more fundamental way.

Pure apperception is a formal condition of objectivity. The sensible condition of objectivity forms
our intuition of an object (spatio-/temporal), the formal condition unites these intuitions for the possibility
of their being subsumed under a concept (category). This unity must be prior to a synthesis of the
imagination in us because it must be presupposed that all of the intuitions, which could be synthesised as
such, all belong to me. Without this latter possible thought, which posits the identity of the self
throughout all intuitions, a subsequent synthesis would merely yield representations which, though
combined with each other, would not belong to me. This apperception is thus pure because I cannot
derive a posteriori an identical self through the cognition of objects themselves, if I did ‘I would have as
multicoloured, diverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious.’

Empirical apperception must thus presuppose pure apperception for, first, the possibility of objects,
secondly, for the identity of the self throughout representations generally. Consequently, the possibility
for objects is also the possibility for self-consciousness. The self-consciousness, however, is not equal to
the (necessarily presupposed) identical self. That identity must necessarily be maintained for any
consciousness of objects whatever (it is objective). The consciousness of that identity is only an ability,
not a necessary consciousness which accompanies every object.[23] The ability to be conscious of the
identity of the self in every representation is expressed by ‘I think’ (this or that object). The I think is
therefore an analytic proposition which can accompany any represented object, analytic because, as
mentioned, an object contains the necessary identity of the self for its possibility.

This possible analysis is self-consciousness as consciousness of the identity of the self throughout
my representations. This I think therefore is also called the analytic unity of consciousness as distinct from
that identity itself (pure apperception) which is called the synthetic unity of consciousness. The former is
self-consciousness, the latter is the self. The analysis I think presupposes the synthesis pure apperception.
The united subjective representations of empirical apperception can be accompanied by the I think which
would determine the identical self that is pure apperception. I think is not equal to empirical apperception:
the self-consciousness of the latter is necessarily subjective, the self-consciousness of the former is
objectively possible.

Pure apperception is an intellectual synthesis of sensible intuitions (synthesis intellectualis). This

means that its synthesis can only be thought, it cannot be intuited. This is because pure apperception is
originally[24] the identity amongst sensible intuitions and therefore cannot be sensibly intuited itself. If it
were, then a contradictory infinite regress would occur whereby one would have to presuppose the
thought of the identity again for this intuited identity to be possible as an object for me, ad infinitum. In
other words, my intuitions must presuppose my self for the possibility of their cognition, therefore I can
never intuit the self which is the condition for any intuitions being cognised. Hence the identity that is
pure apperception is strictly formal, i.e., it cannot be cognised, only thought, for it cannot be sensibly
intuited. This has essential implications for our self-consciousness, as we shall see.

I can have a cognition of the self, but this self is the self as appearance. Empirical apperception is
the cognition of the self as appearance. But the I think is the thought of another self (pure apperception)
which is the condition of the empirical self. Therefore we can think that the self is necessarily not an
appearance, but the condition thereof. But now we cannot have a further cognition of this pure
apperception because the intuition, which would be necessary, could not be sensible (this would be a
contradiction as explained above – the self would be both the condition and the conditioned). Our human
intuition can only be sensible and therefore our self-cognition can only be of ourselves as appearance. But
we can think that we necessarily have an existence behind this as its condition (so we are not mere
appearance), though we cannot know (cognise) what this existence is. Thus, I think that I am, but I know
not what. I have cognition of my self as I appear, but not as I am; and I am certain that I am because I can
cognise. Or as Kant puts it:

In the transcendental synthesis of the manifold of representations in general [synthesis

intellectualis], on the contrary, hence in the synthetic original unity of apperception [pure apperception],
I am conscious of myself [through the I think] not as I appear to myself [as in empirical apperception], nor
as I am in myself, but only that I am. This representation is a thinking, not an intuiting. Now since for
cognition of ourselves, in addition to the action of thinking that brings the manifold of every possible
intuition to the unity of apperception, a determinate sort of intuition, through which this manifold is given,
is also required, my own existence is not indeed appearance (let alone mere illusion), but the
determination of my existence can only occur in correspondence with the form of inner sense, according
to the particular way in which the manifold that I combine is given in inner intuition, and I therefore have
no cognition of myself as I am, but only as I appear to myself. The consciousness of oneself is therefore
far from being a cognition of oneself’. (B157-58, pp. 259-60.)

Intellectual Intuition

We cannot cognise pure apperception because, as explained, the necessary sensible intuition
corresponding to my thought of this self would have to belong to me, and therefore I have posited another
self (me) which is not intuited, but thought. However, if, in theory, the thought (intellectuality) of my self
(pure apperception) could also immediately represent (i.e., intuit) myself, then I would not require a
separate mediating sensible intuition for the cognition of my thought. Such an intellectual intuition would,
therefore, be the only way in which I could cognise my pure apperception. ‘[The self can] cognize itself
merely as it appears to itself with regard to an intuition (which is not intellectual and capable of being
given through the understanding itself), not as it would cognize itself if its intuition were intellectual.’

Such a faculty, however, is unavailable to humans because we intuit things in space and time, and
these forms are transcendentally ideal not real – i.e., things for us are mediated by space and time. Things
cannot be given immediately, as would things in intellectual intuition, because space and time are given
a priori – not therefore given in the immediate intuition of things themselves (a posteriori). In other words,
because we humans have experience in space and time, intellectual intuition is impossible for us,
according to transcendental idealism.

Kant, however, does not say that intellectual intuition is a contradiction, for there may be beings
who do not have experience in space and time, and for whom intellectual intuition could therefore be
valid. ‘[An] understanding that itself intuited … as, say, a divine understanding … would not represent
given objects, but through whose representation the objects would themselves at the same time be given,
or produced’ Intellectual intuition is not a contradiction because transcendental idealism is merely a
human condition.

Intellectual intuition is thus a faculty of direct knowledge, it knows the thing-in-itself. This is because
the thing is the intuition, there is no dualism as in transcendental idealism. If I were to think something,
that thought would be the something; it would not be a thought the object of which was separate. If I
were to intellectually intuit my self, that intuition/thought would be my self. It is therefore absurd to posit
the possibility of intellectually intuiting pure apperception (the human self identity) because pure
apperception is the identity amongst sensible intuitions, the existence of the latter contradicts the
intellectual intuition of the former (due to the mutual exclusivity of sensible and intellectual intuition).
Intellectual intuition is impossible for the human, the self of which cannot be known.

F. W. J. Schelling believes that the human self, as the condition of knowledge, can be known; and
indeed can do so only through intellectual intuition. In the following part we shall examine how he argues
this and thus how he can escape the limits of self-cognition posited by Kant.

Sources:
Immanuel Kant. (2019, April 16). Retrieved November 16, 2019, from
https://www.biography.com/scholar/immanuel-kant.
Peter Sjöstedt. (2017, April 18). Retrieved November 16, 2019, from
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.philosopher.eu/texts/kant-
on-self-consciousness/.
 GILBERT RYLE
British Philosopher

Born on: Died on:

August 19, 1900 October 6, 1976
(Brighton, United Kingdom) (Whitby, United Kingdom)

Biography

Gilbert Ryle was especially well-known for his definitive critique of the Dualism of Descartes (for
which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine") and other traditional mind-body theories. His
form of Philosophical Behaviourism (the belief that all mental phenomena can be explained by reference
to publicly observable behavior) became a standard view for several decades.

Ryle was born on 19 August 1900 in Brighton, England, one of ten children in a prosperous family.
His father was a doctor but also a generalist who had interests in philosophy and astronomy, and passed
on to his children an impressive library, and the young Ryle grew up in an environment of learning.

He was educated at Brighton College and, in 1919, he went to Queen's College, Oxford, initially to
study Classics, although he was soon drawn to Philosophy. He graduated with first class honors in 1924
and was appointed to a lectureship in Philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford. He became a tutor a year later,
and remained at Christ Church until World War II (and remained at Oxford for his entire academic career
until his retirement in 1968).

A capable linguist, Ryle was recruited to intelligence work with the Welsh Guards during World War
II, and rose to the rank of Major by the end of the War. He returned to Oxford in 1945 where he was
elected Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He was
generally regarded as easy-going and sociable and an entertaining conversationalist, but a fierce and
formidable debater, unforgiving of pomposity and pretentiousness.

He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1945 to 1946, and editor of the philosophical
journal "Mind" for nearly twenty-five years from 1947 to 1971. He published his principal work, "The
Concept of Mind", in 1949.

A confirmed bachelor, he lived after his retirement in 1968 with his twin sister, Mary, in the village
of Islip, Oxfordshire. Gardening and walking gave him immense pleasure, as did his pipe (without which
he was rarely seen). Ryle died on 6 October 1976 at Whitby in North Yorkshire, after a day's walking on
the moors.

Perspective on Self:
Logical Behaviorism

The Concept of Mind (1949) is a critique of the notion that the mind is distinct from the body, and
is a rejection of the theory that mental states are separable from physical states. According to Ryle, the
classical theory of mind, as represented by Cartesian rationalism, asserts that there is a basic distinction
between mind and matter. However, the classical theory makes a basic "category-mistake," because it
attempts to analyze the relation between "mind" and "body" as if they were terms of the same logical
category. He argued that philosophers do not need a "hidden" principle to explain the supra-mechanical
capacities of humans, because the workings of the mind are not distinct from the actions of the body, but
are one and the same. Looked at another way, he characterized the mind as a set of capacities and abilities
belonging to the body. This confusion of logical categories may be seen in other theories of the relation
between mind and matter. For example, the idealist theory of mind makes a basic category-mistake by
attempting to reduce physical reality to mental reality, and the materialist theory of mind makes a basic
category-mistake by attempting to reduce mental reality to physical reality.

Ryle rejects Descartes’ theory of the relation between mind and body, on the grounds that it
approaches the investigation of mental processes as if they could be isolated from physical processes. In
order to demonstrate how this theory is misleading, he explains that knowing how to perform an act
skillfully may be not only a matter of being able to reason practically, but also a matter of being able to
put practical reasoning into action. Practical actions may not necessarily be produced by highly theoretical
reasoning or complex sequences of intellectual operations. The meaning of actions may be explained not
by making inferences about hidden mental processes, but by examining the rules that govern those
actions.

He claimed that mental vocabulary is merely a different way of describing action, and that a
person's motives are defined by that person's dispositions to act in certain situations. He concluded that
adequate descriptions of human behavior need never refer to anything but the operations of human
bodies, which can be seen as a form of Philosophical Behaviourism (also known as Analytical or Logical
Behaviourism) which became a standard view among Ordinary Language philosophers for several decades
(although more recently it has morphed into a kind of Functionalism).

According to Ryle, mental processes are merely intelligent acts. There are no mental processes
distinct from intelligent acts. The operations of the mind are not merely represented by intelligent acts;
they are those intelligent acts. Thus, acts of learning, remembering, imagining, knowing, or willing are not
merely clues to hidden mental processes or complex sequences of intellectual operations; they are the
way in which those mental processes or intellectual operations are defined. Logical propositions are not
merely clues to modes of reasoning; they are those modes of reasoning.

The rationalist theory that the will is a faculty within the mind, and that volitions are mental
processes that the human body transforms into physical acts, is therefore a misconception. This theory
mistakenly assumes that mental acts are distinct from physical acts, and that there is a mental world
distinct from the physical world. This theory of the separability of mind and body is described by Ryle as
"the dogma of the ghost in the machine." He explains that there is no hidden entity called "the mind"
inside a mechanical apparatus called "the body." The workings of the mind are not an independent
mechanism that governs the workings of the body. The workings of the mind are not distinct from the
actions of the body; they are rather a way of explaining the actions of the body.

Cartesian theory holds that mental acts determine physical acts, and that volitional acts of the body
must be caused by volitional acts of the mind. This theory is "the myth of the ghost in the machine."

There is no contradiction between saying that a given action is governed by physical laws, and that
it is governed by principles of reasoning. The motives of observable actions are not hidden mental
processes; they are propensities or dispositions that explain why these behaviors occur. For example, the
disposition to want or not want something is not explained by an intellectual act of wanting or not wanting
that thing. The disposition to want something is explained by the behaviors that are involved in wanting
that thing. Thus, the mind consists of various abilities or dispositions that explain such behaviors as
learning, remembering, knowing, feeling, or willing. However, personal abilities or dispositions are not the
same as mental processes or events. To refer to abilities or dispositions as if they are mental occurrences
is to make a basic kind of category-mistake.

The nature of a person’s motives may be defined by the actions and reactions of that person in
various circumstances or situations. The nature of a person’s motives in a particular situation may not
necessarily be determined by any hidden mental processes or intellectual acts within that person. Motives
may be revealed or explained by a person’s behavior in a situation.

Ryle criticizes the theory that the mind is a place where mental images are apprehended, perceived,
or remembered. Sensations, thoughts, and feelings do not belong to a mental world distinct from the
physical world. Knowledge, memory, imagination, and other abilities or dispositions do not reside "within"
the mind as if the mind were a space in which these dispositions could be situated or located.
Furthermore, dispositions are not the same as behavioral actions. Actions may, however, be explained by
dispositions.

Dispositions are neither visible nor hidden, because they are not in the same logical category as
behavioral actions. Dispositions are not mental processes or intellectual acts; they are propensities that
explain various modes of behavior. Perceptions, thoughts, emotions, and feelings may be understood as
observable behaviors that have various modes of production.

Ryle admits that his approach to the theory of mind is behavioristic in being opposed to the theory
that there are hidden mental processes that are distinct from observable behaviors. His approach is based
on the view that actions such as thinking, remembering, feeling, and willing are revealed by modes of
behavior or by dispositions to modes of behavior. At the same time, however, he criticizes both Cartesian
theory and behaviorist theory for being overly mechanistic. While Cartesian theory may insist that hidden
mental events produce the behavioral responses of the conscious individual, behaviorism may insist that
stimulus-response mechanisms produce the behavioral responses of the conscious individual. Ryle says
that both Cartesian theory and behaviorist theory may be too rigid and mechanistic to provide us with an
adequate understanding of the concept of mind.

Sources:

Gilbert Ryle. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.philosophybasics.com/philosophers_ryle.html

Scott, A. (2003). Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind. Retrieved from

http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/ryle.html
 SIGMUND FREUD
Austrian Neurologist

Born on: Died on:

May 6, 1856 September 23, 1939
(Příbor, Czechia) (Hampstead, London, United Kingdom)

Biography

Freud’s father, Jakob, was a Jewish wool merchant who had been married once before he wed the
boy’s mother, Amalie Nathansohn. The father, 40 years old at Freud’s birth, seems to have been a
relatively remote and authoritarian figure, while his mother appears to have been more nurturant and
emotionally available. Although Freud had two older half-brothers, his strongest if also most ambivalent
attachment seems to have been to a nephew, John, one year his senior, who provided the model of
intimate friend and hated rival that Freud reproduced often at later stages of his life.

In 1859, the Freud family was compelled for economic reasons to move to Leipzig and then a year
after to Vienna, where Freud remained until the Nazi annexation of Austria 78 years later. Despite Freud’s
dislike of the imperial city, in part because of its citizens’ frequent anti-Semitism, psychoanalysis reflected
in significant ways the cultural and political context out of which it emerged. For example, Freud’s
sensitivity to the vulnerability of paternal authority within the psyche may well have been stimulated by
the decline in power suffered by his father’s generation, often liberal rationalists, in the Habsburg empire.
So too his interest in the theme of the seduction of daughters was rooted in complicated ways in the
context of Viennese attitudes toward female sexuality.

In 1873, Freud was graduated from the Sperl Gymnasium and, apparently inspired by a public
reading of an essay by Goethe on nature, turned to medicine as a career. At the University of Vienna, he
worked with one of the leading physiologists of his day, Ernst von Brücke, an exponent of the materialist,
antivitalist science of Hermann von Helmholtz. In 1882, he entered the General Hospital in Vienna as a
clinical assistant to train with the psychiatrist Theodor Meynert and the professor of internal medicine
Hermann Nothnagel. In 1885, Freud was appointed lecturer in neuropathology, having concluded
important research on the brain’s medulla. At this time, he also developed an interest in the
pharmaceutical benefits of cocaine, which he pursued for several years. Although some beneficial results
were found in eye surgery, which have been credited to Freud’s friend Carl Koller, the general outcome
was disastrous. Not only did Freud’s advocacy lead to a mortal addiction in another close friend, Ernst
Fleischl von Marxow, but it also tarnished his medical reputation for a time. Whether or not one interprets
this episode in terms that call into question Freud’s prudence as a scientist, it was of a piece with his
lifelong willingness to attempt bold solutions to relieve human suffering.

Freud’s scientific training remained of cardinal importance in his work, or at least in his own
conception of it. In such writings as his “Entwurf einer Psychologie” (written 1895, published 1950;
“Project for a Scientific Psychology”) he affirmed his intention to find a physiological and materialist basis
for his theories of the psyche. Here a mechanistic neurophysiological model vied with a more organismic,
phylogenetic one in ways that demonstrate Freud’s complicated debt to the science of his day.

In late 1885, Freud left Vienna to continue his studies of neuropathology at the Salpêtrière clinic in
Paris, where he worked under the guidance of Jean-Martin Charcot. His 19 weeks in the French capital
proved a turning point in his career, for Charcot’s work with patients classified as “hysterics” introduced
Freud to the possibility that psychological disorders might have their source in the mind rather than the
brain. Charcot’s demonstration of a link between hysterical symptoms, such as paralysis of a limb, and
hypnotic suggestion implied the power of mental states rather than nerves in the etiology of disease.
Although Freud was soon to abandon his faith in hypnosis, he returned to Vienna in February 1886 with
the seed of his revolutionary psychological method implanted.

Several months after his return Freud married Martha Bernays, the daughter of a prominent Jewish
family whose ancestors included a chief rabbi of Hamburg and Heinrich Heine. She was to bear six
children, one of whom, Anna Freud, was to become a distinguished psychoanalyst in her own right.
Although the glowing picture of their marriage painted by Ernest Jones in his biography of Freud has been
nuanced by later scholars, it is clear that Martha Bernays Freud was a deeply sustaining presence during
her husband’s tumultuous career.

Shortly after his marriage, Freud began his closest friendship, with the Berlin physician Wilhelm
Fliess, whose role in the development of psychoanalysis has occasioned widespread debate. Throughout
the 15 years of their intimacy, Fliess provided Freud an invaluable interlocutor for his most daring ideas.
Freud’s belief in human bisexuality, his idea of erotogenic zones on the body, and perhaps even his
imputation of sexuality to infants may well have been stimulated by their friendship.

A somewhat less controversial influence arose from the partnership Freud began with the physician
Josef Breuer after his return from Paris. Freud turned to a clinical practice in neuropsychology, and the
office he established at Berggasse 19 was to remain his consulting room for almost half a century. Before
their collaboration began, during the early 1880s, Breuer had treated a patient named Bertha
Pappenheim—or “Anna O.,” as she became known in the literature—who was suffering from a variety of
hysterical symptoms. Rather than using hypnotic suggestion, as had Charcot, Breuer allowed her to lapse
into a state resembling autohypnosis, in which she would talk about the initial manifestations of her
symptoms. To Breuer’s surprise, the very act of verbalization seemed to provide some relief from their
hold over her (although later scholarship has cast doubt on its permanence). “The talking cure” or
“chimney sweeping,” as Breuer and Anna O., respectively, called it, seemed to act cathartically to produce
an abreaction, or discharge, of the pent-up emotional blockage at the root of the pathological behaviour.

Perspective on Self:
Id, Ego, Superego

Freud's personality theory (1923) saw the psyche structured into three parts (i.e., tripartite), the
id, ego and superego, all developing at different stages in our lives. These are systems, not parts of the
brain, or in any way physical. According to Freud's model of the psyche, the id is the primitive and
instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories, the super-
ego operates as a moral conscience, and the ego is the realistic part that mediates between the desires
of the id and the super-ego. Although each part of the personality comprises unique features, they interact
to form a whole, and each part makes a relative contribution to an individual's behavior.

The id is the impulsive (and unconscious) part of our psyche which responds directly and
immediately to basic urges, needs, and desires. The personality of the newborn child is all id and only later
does it develop an ego and super-ego. The id remains infantile in its function throughout a person's life
and does not change with time or experience, as it is not in touch with the external world. The id is not
affected by reality, logic or the everyday world, as it operates within the unconscious part of the mind.

The id operates on the pleasure principle (Freud, 1920) which is the idea that every wishful impulse
should be satisfied immediately, regardless of the consequences. When the id achieves its demands, we
experience pleasure when it is denied we experience ‘unpleasure’ or tension.

The id engages in primary process thinking, which is primitive, illogical, irrational, and fantasy
oriented. This form of process thinking has no comprehension of objective reality, and is selfish and
wishful in nature.

The ego develops to mediate between the unrealistic id and the external real world. It is the
decision-making component of personality. Ideally, the ego works by reason, whereas the id is chaotic
and unreasonable. The ego operates according to the reality principle, working out realistic ways of
satisfying the id’s demands, often compromising or postponing satisfaction to avoid negative
consequences of society. The ego considers social realities and norms, etiquette and rules in deciding how
to behave.

Like the id, the ego seeks pleasure (i.e., tension reduction) and avoids pain, but unlike the id, the
ego is concerned with devising a realistic strategy to obtain pleasure. The ego has no concept of right or
wrong; something is good simply if it achieves its end of satisfying without causing harm to itself or the id.
Often the ego is weak relative to the headstrong id, and the best the ego can do is stay on, pointing the id
in the right direction and claiming some credit at the end as if the action were its own.

Freud made the analogy of the id being a horse while the ego is the rider. The ego is 'like a man on
horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse.'
 If the ego fails in its attempt to use the reality principle, and anxiety is experienced, unconscious
defense mechanisms are employed, to help ward off unpleasant feelings (i.e., anxiety) or make good
things feel better for the individual.

The ego engages in secondary process thinking, which is rational, realistic, and orientated towards
problem-solving. If a plan of action does not work, then it is thought through again until a solution is
found. This is known as reality testing and enables the person to control their impulses and demonstrate
self-control, via mastery of the ego. An important feature of clinical and social work is to enhance ego
functioning and help the client test reality through assisting the client to think through their options.

The superego's function is to control the id's impulses, especially those which society forbids, such
as sex and aggression. It also has the function of persuading the ego to turn to moralistic goals rather than
simply realistic ones and to strive for perfection.

The superego consists of two systems: The conscience and the ideal self. The conscience can punish
the ego through causing feelings of guilt. For example, if the ego gives in to the id's demands, the superego
may make the person feel bad through guilt. The ideal self (or ego-ideal) is an imaginary picture of how
you ought to be, and represents career aspirations, how to treat other people, and how to behave as a
member of society. Behavior which falls short of the ideal self may be punished by the superego through
guilt. The super-ego can also reward us through the ideal self when we behave ‘properly’ by making us
feel proud. If a person’s ideal self is too high a standard, then whatever the person does will represent
failure. The ideal self and conscience are largely determined in childhood from parental values and how
you were brought up.

When talking about the id, the ego, and the superego, it is important to remember that these are
not three totally separate entities with clearly defined boundaries. These aspects of personality are
dynamic and always interacting with a person to influence an individual's overall personality and behavior.

With so many competing forces, it is easy to see how conflict might arise between the id, ego, and
superego. Freud used the term ego strength to refer to the ego's ability to function despite these dueling
forces.6 A person with good ego strength is able to effectively manage these pressures, while those with
too much or too little ego strength can become too unyielding or too disrupting.

According to Freud, the key to a healthy personality is a balance between the id, the ego, and the
superego. If the ego is able to adequately moderate between the demands of reality, the id, and the
superego, a healthy and well-adjusted personality emerges. Freud believed that an imbalance between
these elements would lead to a maladaptive personality. An individual with an overly dominant id, for
example, might become impulsive, uncontrollable, or even criminal. This individual acts upon his or her
most basic urges with no concern for whether the behavior is appropriate, acceptable, or legal. An overly
dominant superego, on the other hand, might lead to a personality that is extremely moralistic and
judgmental. This person may be unable to accept anything or anyone that he or she perceives as "bad" or
"immoral."

According to Freud, the id, ego, and superego all operate across three levels of awareness in the
human mind, each with their own roles and functions:

 The preconscious consists of anything that could potentially be brought into the conscious
mind.
  The conscious mind contains all of the thoughts, memories, feelings, and wishes of which
we are aware at any given moment. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we
can think and talk about rationally. This also includes our memory, which is not always
part of consciousness but can be retrieved easily and brought into awareness.
 The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that are
outside of our conscious awareness. The unconscious contains contents that are
unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict.

Freud likened the three levels of mind to an iceberg. The top of the iceberg that you can see above
the water represents the conscious mind. The part of the iceberg that is submerged below the water but
is still visible is the preconscious. The bulk of the iceberg that lies unseen beneath the waterline represents
the unconscious.

Sources:

Jay, M. E. (2019, Oct 31). Sigmund Freud. Retrieved from

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sigmund-Freud

McLeod, S. A. (2019, Sept 25). Id, ego and superego. Simply Psychology.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/psyche.html

Cherry, K. (2019, Oct 03). Freud's Id, Ego, and Superego. Retrieved from
https://www.verywellmind.com/the-id-ego-and-superego-2795951