UNIT6: PHILOSOPHY: PERSONAL IDENTITY A123: INTRODUCTION TO HUMANITIES

What Philosophy Is The word Philosophy is derived from the old Greek and Roman Philosophia. Philo + Sophia Philo = love of Sophia = wisdom Philosophia = love of wisdom

A philosophy is a comprehensive system of ideas about human nature and the nature of the reality we live in. Because the issues it addresses are basic, philosophy is a guide for living, determining the course we take in life, and how we treat other people.

Categories of Philosophy The ancient Greeks organized the subject into five basic categories: aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and metaphysics. This organization of the subject is still largely in use today and can be profitably used regardless of where one’s answers to specific philosophical questions lie.

Branches of Philosophy Aesthetics (the theory of the nature of art) Epistemology (the theory of knowledge) Ethics (the theory of moral values) Metaphysics (the theory of reality and existence) Politics (the theory of legal rights and government)

John Locke John Locke widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work had a great impact upon the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the American Declaration of Independence.

John Locke Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau and Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to pre-existing Cartesian philosophy, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception.

Personal Identity – John Locke In philosophy, Personal Identity refers to the essence of a self-conscious person, which makes him or her unique. It persists making the person modifications happen through one single identity. The question regarding personal identity has addressed the conditions under which a person at one time is the same person at another time, known as personal continuity. This sort of analysis of personal identity provides a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the identity of the person over time.

Aristotle Aristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality and aesthetics, logic and science, politics and metaphysics.

Aristotle His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church and some strains of Eastern Orthodox thought. His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today.

Memory- Aristotle Memory to Aristotle is “the cabinet of imagination, the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience, and the council chamber of thought.” Memory’s value to the thinking mind has never been controversial. What has at times been controversial is the value of memory with respect to personal identity.

Any experience that a person could remember is his/hers, one that happened to him/her. Thus, the distinction between knowing of present experiences by our five external senses and knowing of them by our sixth inner sense is carried over into memory. It requires that our minds remember everything that has ever happened to us, forgetting nothing along the way. Of course, we CANNOT remember EVERYTHING.

Sydney Shoemaker, a prominent critic of ‘memory theory’ explained that being capable of making memory statements about our own past is part of the concept of a person. Since it is a theoretical truth that memory statements are generally true, it is a conceptual truth that people are capable of knowing their own pasts in a special way that does not involve the use of criteria of personal identity. It is also a logical fact that the memory claims whatever a person makes, and that can be used by others as grounds for statements about the past history of that person. Memory would seem to be a necessary condition of personal identity.