Introduction To the Philosophy of The

Human Person
1st Semester - 2nd Quarter
Examination Reviewer

Prepared By:
Ledda, Calvin Jay M.
11-STEM 3

Submitted To:
Ms. Jhuvy G. Reyes
 Lesson 1:
Freedom of the Human Person

Freedom
• An intrinsic and essential property of the person.
• The Exercise of Free Will and Intellect.
• Freedom is experienced through the act of making choices.
• Should be exercised with control and a recognition of reasonable limits, which
requires us to sacrifice self-interests and accept certain realities that are beyond our
control.

Key Individuals:
• Aristotle
• St. Thomas Aquinas
• Jean Paul Sartre
• Thomas Hobbes
• Jean Jacques Rousseau

Aristotle
Power of Volition

• The imperative quality of practical intellect is meaningless apart from will.

Reason can legislate, but only through will can its legislation be translated into
action.
• The task of practical intellect is to guide will be enlightening it.
• If there were no intellect, there will be no will.
• The will of humanity is an instrument of free choice. It is within the power of
everyone to be good or bad, worthy, or worthless. This is borne out by:
➢ Our inner awareness of an aptitude to do right or wrong.
➢ The common testimony of all human beings.
➢ The rewards and punishments of rules.
➢ The general employment of praise and blame.
• For Aristotle, a human being is rational. Reason is a divine characteristic. Human
have the spark of the divine. If there were no intellect, there would be no will.
Our will is the instrument of Free choice.

St. Thomas Aquinas:

Freedom is Love

• He considers that the human being as a moral agent. Hence, our spirituality
separates us from animals. Human beings have the power to change themselves
and the things around them. Change should promote the good of community.
 • Fourfold Classification of Law:
➢ Eternal Law: The decree of God that governs all creation. It is, “That law
which is the Supreme Reason cannot be understood to be otherwise than
unchangeable and Eternal.”
Eternal Law was God’s perfect plan, not fully knowable to humans. It
determined the way things such as animals and plants behaved and how
people should behave.
➢ Natural Law: It is the human “participation” in the eternal law and is
discovered by Reason.
The master principle of natural law, wrote Aquinas, was that “good is to
be done and pursued and evil avoided.” Aquinas stated that reason
reveals particular natural laws that are good for humans such as self-
preservation, marriage and family, and the desire to know God.
➢ Human Law: Law is directed to the common good, and human law is no
exception. The promotion of virtue is necessary for the common good,
and human laws are instruments in the promotion of virtue.
For Aquinas, human laws are derived from natural law which is a
participation in the eternal law.
➢ Divine Law: Derived from eternal law as it appears historically to humans,
especially through revelation, i.e., when it appears to human beings as
divine commands.
According to St. Thomas Aquinas, divine law is necessary because no
human being could ever have access to the natural law without receiving
the divine law first.

• Spiritual Freedom
➢ St. Thomas Aquinas establishes the existence of God as the first cause. Of
all God’s creations, human beings have the unique power to change
themselves and things around them for the better. As humans, we are
both material and spiritual.
➢ We have a conscience because of our spirituality. God is love, and love is
our destiny.

Jean Paul Sartre

Individual Freedom

• Sartre’s Philosophy is considered to be a representative of existentialism

(Falikowski 2004). For Sartre, the human person is the desire to be God: the
desire to exist as a being which has its sufficient ground in itself (en sui causa).
• There are no guideposts along the road of life. The human person builds the road
to the destiny of his/her choosing; he/she is the creator (Srathern 1998).
• Authentic existence is realized only in deeds committed alone, in absolute
freedom and responsibility, and which, therefore, is the character of true
creation.
• The person is what one has done and is doing.
 • The human person who tries to escape obligations and strives to be en-sol is
acting in bad faith (mauvaisfoi).
• Sartre emphasizes the importance of free individual choice, regardless of the
power of the other people, to influence and coerce our desires, beliefs, and
decisions. To be human, be conscious, be free to imagine, be free to choose, and
be responsible for one’s life.

Thomas Hobbes
Theory of Social Contract

• A law of nature (lex naturalis) is a precept or general rule established by reason,

by which a person is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life or takes
away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that by which he thinks it
may be best preserved.
• According to Hobbes, it is natural and rational for people to give up some liberty
to gain self-preservations security. Hobbes develops a conception of what forms
of social organization and political system are consistent with those.
• The condition in which people give up one individual liberty in exchange for
some common security is the Social Contract. Hobbes defines a contract as the
“mutual transferring of right.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Social Contract

• Rousseau is one of the most famous and influential philosophers of the French
Enlightenment in the 18th century.
• The “EDSA Revolution” is an example, though an imperfect one of what the
theory of Social contract is all about.
• According to Hobbes and Rousseau, the state owes its origin to a social contract
freely entered into by its members.
• Hobbes developed his idea in favor of absolute monarchy, while Rousseau
interpreted the idea in terms of absolute democracy and individualism.
• Social Contract Theory, but more on individualism.
➢ Both of them believe that we have to form a community to protect
ourselves from one another because we tend to wage war since we also
tend to self-preserve, so they have to come to a free mutual agreement
to protect themselves.
 Lesson 2:
Intersubjectivity

Intersubjectivity: It is a term coined by social scientists to refer to a variety of types of

human interaction. It involves the sharing of intentions, experiences, feelings and values with
others.

Intersubjectivity as Ontology: The Social Dimension of Oneself

Martin Buber & Karol Wojtyla

• Buber and Wojtyla’s view will be used as the main framework in understanding
intersubjectivity.
• Both philosophers were influenced by their religious background.
• They believed in the notion of concrete experience/existence of human person.
• Both refused to regard the human person as a composite of some kind of
dimensions, such as animality and rationality.
Martin Buber

• Born in Vienna and was brought up in Jewish Tradition.

• A Jewish existentialist philosopher.
• In his work I and thou (Ich and Du) (1923), he conceives the human person in
his/her wholeness, totality, concrete existence and relatedness to the world.
• I-You Relation
➢ Buber’s I-thou philosophy is about the human person as a subject, who
is a being different from things or from objects.
➢ Human person experiences his wholeness, not in the virtue of his relation
to one’s self but in virtue of his relation to another self.
➢ Human person establishes the world of mutual relation, of experience.
➢ Human person as subjects has direct and mutual sharing of selves. This
signifies a person-to-person, subject-to-subject relation or acceptance,
sincerity, concern, respect, dialog and care.
➢ Human person is not just being-in-the-world but being-with-others, or
being-in-relation.
Karol Wojtyla

• Born in Wadowice, Poland.

• Also known as Pope John Paul II.
• He was elected to the Papacy on October 16, 1978 (264th pope) and was
considered as a great pope during his lifetime.
• In his encyclical letter, Fides et ratio, he criticized the traditional definition of
human as “rational animal”.
• We Relation
➢ Refers to the interpersonal which fulfills and actualizes oneself.
➢ Human person attains fulfillment in the realm of interpersonal.
➢ We are oriented toward relation and sharing in communal life for the
common good.
 ➢ We participate in the communal life (WE). Our notion of the neighbor and
fellow member is by participating in the humanness of the other person.
➢ As what St. Augustine of Hippo said, “No human being should become an
end to him/herself. We are responsible to our neighbors as we are to our own
actions”

Person with Disabilities, Women and Underprivileged Sectors

Person with Disabilities

• Being a parent of a child with disability include feelings of shock, bewilderment,

sorrow, anger and guilt.
• Feeling of impotence or questioning “why me?” are some feelings of
ambivalence regarding their child’s condition.
• Some parents consider “heaven sent”. Additional reactions include fear of the
future and worrying about how the disability will affect child’s productivity.
• Parents whose children were diagnosed with disability have to let go of their
dream child.
• Realization and grief can blind parents to their child’s uniqueness.
• Negative attitudes of the family and community toward PWDs may add to their
poor academic and vocational outcomes.
• Famous People with Disability
➢ Apolinario Mabini
➢ Stephen Hawkings
➢ Nick Vucijic
Women

• Jean Jacques Rosseau (1972) said that women should be educated to please
men. He believes that women should be useful to men, should take care, console
men, and to render men’s lives easy and agreeable.
• He also influenced the development of modern political, sociological and
educational thought.
• Mary Wollstonecraft in Vindication on the Rights of Women (1782) argued that
such education should produce women who were mere propagators of fool.
• She believes that women must united to men in wisdom and rationality. Society
should allow women to attain equal rights to philosophy and education.
• Famous Empowered Women
➢ Amelia Earhart
➢ Hidilyn Diaz
➢ Queen Elizabeth II
Underprivileged Sectors

• The notion of poverty is not one-dimensional; rather it is multidimensional.

• These dimensions have the common characteristic of representing deprivation
that encompasses: Income, Health, Education, Empowerment and Working
condition.
• The most common measure of the underprivileged is income poverty which
defined in terms of consumption of goods and services.
 • Poor health is also an aspect of poverty. Health deprivation is the focal point for
the underprivileged.
• Human rights is also relevant. The church, in its pro-poor stance, is constantly
challenged wherein justice is being denied for sectors like farmers, labors,
fisherfolks, indigenous people and victims of calamity.

Authentic Dialogue
• A dialog is a conversation that is attuned to each other and to whatever they are
talking about. Mutual tuning is perfected in the attunement.
• An authentic dialog entails a person-to-person, a mutual sharing of selves,
acceptance and sincerity.
Martin Heidegger

• In his essay, he says that humankind is a conversation. Conversation is more than

an idle talk but a dialog.
• Language as one of human possession, creates human world.
• For Heidegger, all conversations are really one conversation.
• A conversation is creative, poetic and deep that allows humanity to exist as more
than entities.
 Lesson 3:
The Human Person in Society

Recognize How Individuals Form Societies

Soren Kierkegaard

• Father of existentialism
• For him, rather than being ourselves, we tend to conform to an image or idea
associated with being a certian type of person.
• We are reduced to mediocrity.
Aristotle

• Student of Plato.
• He said that friends are two bodies with one soul.
Martin Buber

• The human person attains fulfillment in the realm of the interpersonal, in

meeting the other, through a genuine dialog.
Karol Wojtyla

• Through participation, we share in the humanness of others.

Compare Different Forms of Societies and Individualities

Medieval Period/Middle Ages/Dark Ages

• German Barbarians
• Roman Empire
• The way of life in the Middle Ages is called “Feudalism” which comes from
medieval Latin ‘feudum’ meaning property or possession.
• 7 Liberal Arts
Modern Period (1500-1800)

• Christopher Columbus had landed his ships in the “new world”, altering not only
the geography but the politics of the world forever.
• The Vitruvian Man drawn by Leonardo Da Vinci. It is a symbol of harmony, a
canon proportions, and the epitome of perfection.
• Philosophy in 17th Century Era
➢ Naturalism: the Philosophers at this time had left off contemplating the
heaven of medieval piety and were disposed to deigy nature.
• Philosophy in 18th Century Era (Age of Empiricism)
➢ John Locke
➢ David Hume
➢ George Berkeley
 • Near the end of the Century
➢ Immanuel Kant
➢ Galileo Galilei
➢ Nicolas Copernicus
Globalization & Technological Innovations

• Globalization: is not a one-way process, but comprises the multilateral

interactions among global systems, local practices, transnational trends and
personal lifestyles.
• Industrial Revolution.
• Significant Changes brought about the Industrial Revolution
➢ The invention of machines in lieu of doing the work of hand tools.
➢ The use of steam, and other kinds of power vis-a-visthe muscles of
human beings and of animals.
➢ The embracing of factory system.