Instructor: Mhelven A.

Barrientos, LPT
 Socrates believed that the
“self” exist in two parts.
• Physically, the earth is
constantly modified.
• Soul, which he believed to be
immortal. The soul is the part
of unvarying.
 Socrates was more concerned with another
subject, the problem of the self. He was the
first philosophers who ever engaged in a
systematic questioning about the self. To
Socrates, and this has become his life-long
mission, the true task of the philosopher is to
know oneself. For Socrates, every man is
composed of body and soul. This means that
every human person is dualistic, that is, he is
composed of two important aspects of his
personhood. This means, all individuals have
an imperfect, impermanent aspect which is
the body, while maintaining that there is
also a soul that is perfect and permanent.
Plato, at least in many of his
dialogues, held that the true
self of human beings in the
reason or the intellect that
constitutes their soul and
that is separate from their
body.
 Plato, Socrates student, basically took off from
his master and supported the idea that main is
dual nature of body and soul. In addition, Plato
added that there are three components of the
soul: the rational soul, spirited soul, and the
appetitive soul. He emphasizes that justice in the
human person can only be attained if the three
parts of the soul are working harmoniously with
one another. The rational soul fake by reason
and intellect has to govern the affairs of the
human person; the spirited part which is in
charge of emotions should be kept at bay and the
appetitive soul in charge of base desires like
eating, drinking, sleeping are controlled as well.
When this ideal state is attained, then the human
person’s soul becomes just and virtuous.
 Augustine agreed that man is of a
bifurcated or divided in to two
nature. The body is bound to die on
earth and the soul is to anticipate
living eternally in a kingdom of
spiritual bliss in communion with
God. The goal of every human
person is to attain this communion
and bliss with the Divine by living
his life on earth in virtue.
 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.
 Thomas Aquinas, the most eminent 13th
century scholar and stalwart of the medieval
philosophy appended something to the
Christian view. Aquinas said that, man is
composed of two parts: matter and form.
Matter or hyle in Greek is “common stuff that
makes up everything in the universe” Man’s
body is made up of matter. Form or morphe in
Greek refers to the “essence of a substance or
thing”. To Aquinas, just as in Aristotle, the soul
is what animates the body; it is what makes us
human.
 Rene Descartes, Father of Modern Philosophy,
conceived of the human person as having a body
and a mind. He thought that the only thing that
one cannot doubt is the existence of the self, for
even if one doubts oneself that only proves that
there is a doubting self, a thing that thinks and
therefore, that cannot be doubted. He also
believes that self has two distinct entities, the
cogito – the thing that thinks which is the mind,
and the extenza or extension of the mind, which is
the body. In Descartes view, the body is nothing
else but a machine that is attached to the mind.
The human person has it but it is not what makes
a man.
David Hume, a Scottish philosopher, has a very
unique way of looking at man. He argues that
self is not an entity over and beyond the
physical body. To David, Hue, the self is nothing
else but a bundle of impressions. What are
impressions? If one tries to examine his
experiences, he finds that they can all be
categorized into two: impressions and ideas.
Impressions are the basic objects of our
experience or sensation. They form the core of
our thoughts. Impressions therefore are
brilliant because they are products of our direct
experience with the world. Ideas, on other
hand, are copies of impressions; they are not
as lively and brilliant as our impressions.
 Kant recognizes the authenticity of Hume’s
account that everything starts with perception
and sensation of impressions. To Kant, there is
necessarily a mind that organizes the
impressions that men get from the external
world. Time and space, for example, are ideas
that one cannot find in the world, but is built in
our mind. Kant calls these the apparatuses of
the mind. 6 Along with the different
apparatuses of the mind goes the “self”.
Without the self, one cannot organize the
different impressions that one gets in relation
to his own existence. He suggested that it is an
active engaged intelligence in man that
synthesizes all knowledge and experience.
 Gilbert Ryle solves the mind-body
dichotomy that has been running for
a long time in the history. According
to him, what truly matters is the
behavior that a person manifests in
his day to-day life. Ryle suggests that
the “self” is not an entity one can
locate and analyze but simply the
convenient name that people use to
refer to all the behaviors that people
make
 Merleau-Ponty is a
phenomenologist who asserts that
the mind-body bifurcation that has
been going for a long time is futile
endeavor and an invalid problem.
He says that mind and body are so
intertwined that they cannot be
separated from one another. One
cannot find any experience that is
not an embodied experience
ASSESSMENT 1:
ESSAY 1. In your own definition, how would
you define the term self?
Desired Learning Outcomes:
1. To be able to identify the different
ideas in psychology about the “self”.
2. To be able to analyze the effects of
various factors identified in
psychology in the formation of the
“self”.
William James (1890) was one of the earliest psychologists to study the
self and conceptualized the self as having two aspects – the “I” and the
“me”. The “I” is the thinking, acting and feeling self and “me” on the
other hand, is the physical characteristics as well as psychological
capabilities that make who you are.
Carl Rogers’ (1959) theory of personality also
used the same terms “I” as the one who acts and
decides while the “me” is what you think or feel
about yourself as an object.
Under the theory of symbolic
interactionism, G.H. Mead (1934) argued
that the self is created and developed
through human interactions
(Hogg and Vaughan, 2010). There are three reasons why self and identity are social
products 1. We do not create ourselves out of noting. 2. We actually need others to affirm
and reinforce who we think we are. 3. What we think is important to us may also have
been influenced by what is important in our social or historical context.
Social interaction and group affiliation, therefore, are vital factors in creating our self-concept especially in the
aspect of providing us with our social identity. There are times when we are aware of our self-concepts – this is
also called self-awareness. Carver and Scheier (1981) identified two types of self that we can be aware of (1)
private self or your internal standards and private thoughts and feelings (2) the public self or your public image
commonly geared toward having good presentation of yourself to others.