Introduction to Philosophy

Achieve Test Prep: Philosophy

Descartes believed that your physical body is secondary to your personal identity; meaning that you can conceive of yourself existing independently of your body. Even though your body is not as central to yourself as is your capacity to think and reflect, it clearly plays a role in your self-identity. Descartes demonstrates the powerful influence by Plato’s thought in his distinction between the physical body (which he believes is material, mortal, and non-thinking) and an immortal, nonmaterial thinking self- governed by God’s will and the laws of reason (which is spiritual: mind and soul). He recognized the need to acknowledge the close intimate relationship between the mind and body. Descartes was considered a proponent of the rationalist view of knowledge where reason is the primary source of all knowledge and that only our reasoning abilities can enable us to understand, sense, experience, and reach accurate conclusions. Locke: The Self is Consciousness John Locke was an English philosopher and physician. He believed that all knowledge originates in our direct sense experience, which acts as the final court of judgment in evaluating the accuracy and value of ideas. Locke was considered to be an advocate of the empiricist view of knowledge, which holds that sense experience is the primary source of all knowledge and that by paying careful attention to sense experiences, we are enabled to understand the world and achieve accurate conclusions. Locke is best known for his work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding . For Locke, the essence of the self is its conscious awareness of itself as a thinking, reasoning, and reflecting identity. Conscious awareness and memory of previous experiences are keys to understanding the self, meaning that you have a coherent concept of yourself because you are aware of yourself when you are thinking, feeling, and willing. Locke argued that our personal identity and the immortal soul in which the identity is located are very different entities. His revolutionary theory is that the mind is a blank slate on which experience writes. Hume: There is No Self Hume was a Scottish philosopher and prolific writer best known for his work, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding . David Hume believed that the source of all genuine knowledge is our direct sense experience. Using the same empiricist principles as Locke, Hume believed if we carefully examine our sense experience through the process of introspection, we will discover that there is no self. Hume believed if we carefully examine the contents of our experiences, there are only two distinct entities: impressions and ideas. Impressions are basic sensations of our experience, the elemental data of our minds: pain, pleasure, heat, cold, happiness, grief, fear, exhilaration, and so on; the impressions are lively and vivid. Ideas are copies of impressions and, as a result, are less lively and vivid. Ideas include thoughts and images that are built up from our primary impressions through a variety of relationships, but because they are derivative copies of impressions, they are once removed from reality. Our memories and experiences are made up of impressions and ideas with no one “constant and invariable” self that exists as a unified identity. When we are not actively perceiving or conscious of ourselves perceiving, there is no basis for the belief that there is any self. All of our experiences are perceptions and none of these perceptions resemble a unified and permanent self-identity that exists over time.

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