Heart B.

Alde BSED 1A-English August 31, 2022

 John Locke, a British Empiricist believes that the mind is a tabula rasa or blank state when we are
born. For him, the thoughts and ideas we acquire are products of our innate ideas and that the self
therefore is something that is shaped by conscious experience of the world.

 Rene Descartes was a Rationalist who stated “I act, therefore I am.”

 Descartes' search for a proposition that could not be contested came to an end with his assertion,
"I think, therefore I am." As he was the one who was doubting himself in the first place, he
discovered that he could not doubt that he actually existed. "Cogito, ergo sum" is the expression
used in Latin, the language used by Descartes.

 Immanuel Kant believes that we have an innate mechanism called the a priori concepts that helps
organize our experiences that makes it tangible. Though his mechanism, we are able to organize
our experience in the environment and make meaning out of those experiences. Meaning, we are
the ones who construct the self and that it is a transcendental unifying principle of consciousness.

 David Hume indicates that the self is nothing more than a collection of experiences that are
continually changing. Every previous sensation would no longer be part of the conscious
experience but rather only a part of our memory. Therefore, Hume insists that there is no such
thing as a self but only a collection of experiences.

 According to what Plato believed, appetite, will/spirit, and reason are the parts of the soul.
Appetite refers to physical urges such as hunger, thirst, and sexual desires while the will includes
passion, aggression, and emotions that we feel. Reason gives us the faculty to make sound
judgements, make wise choices and understand eternal truths.

 Using the Socratic Method, learners are encouraged to engage in critical thinking. Ideally, the
responses to questions serve as a starting point for additional study and investigation rather than
serving as a conclusion to thought.

 I sometimes doubt if I am really who I am when I interact with other people. After reflecting each
end of the day, I am much aware of who I am because I know for myself that I do not sugarcoat
what I say and stage how I act. Therefore, I am certain that “I act, therefore I am.”
 The body is an essential part of who we are since it may be thought of as the physical being that
allows us to interact with the outside world. We may not call ourselves alive without our physical
form.

 The Life of John Locke

John Locke was an English philosopher born in 1632. His father was a lawyer and a Puritan who
fought against the Royalists during the English Civil War. The commander of his father’s
regiment, Alexander Popham, a wealthy MP, arranged for Locke’s education at Westminster and
Oxford. At Oxford, Locke studied medicine, assisting in the laboratory of the chemist Robert
Boyle, and produced several of his early works, including the texts which would be posthumously
published as the Two Tracts on Government and the Essays on the Law of Nature. Locke stayed on
at the university until 1666, when he met Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, a
powerful political figure who would serve as Lord of the Exchequer and Lord Chancellor, and later
as one of the founders of the Whig party.

Shaftesbury’s and Locke’s meeting came about after Shaftesbury had suffered an abscess on his
liver, and Locke was sent to attend him. Shortly thereafter, Locke devised a means by which to treat
the abscess by surgically installing a pipe with a faucet-like fixture to drain it, which against all
odd worked. In gratitude, Shaftesbury placed Locke in various administrative offices over which he
held sway; Locke served as the secretary to the proprietors of the Carolina colony and to the Board
of Trade, composing the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in the service of his patron, as
well as reports to the Board of Trade that laid out some of his early economic ideas. He also served
as a tutor to Shaftesbury’s son, the third earl of Shaftesbury, who would go on to become a
philosopher in his own right.
Locke left England for France in 1675, but returned in 1679 to assist Shaftesbury during the
Exclusion Crisis. Shaftesbury was involved in the Whig effort to prevent Charles II’s Catholic
younger brother, James, from inheriting the throne, at first by means of parliamentary legislation
to exclude Catholic heirs from the royal succession. Under an increasing cloud of suspicion for his
involvement in extra-legal Exclusion efforts, Locke fled to Holland in 1683 and did not return to
England until 1688. It was long thought that Locke wrote the Two Treatises of Government in 1688
in order to provide a philosophical justification for the Glorious Revolution, but more recent
scholarship has suggested that he in fact composed most of the work during the period of the
Exclusion Crisis in the context of pressure to find a way to exclude Catholics from the royal
succession. The final version bears the traces of both events, and the Glorious Revolution was
certainly conducive to Locke’s own politics. He returned to England and began publishing his
work for the first time. In 1689, the Two Treatises and the Letter Concerning Toleration were
published anonymously, and he had the Essay Concerning Human Understanding printed under
his name.

The Essay in particular brought him broad fame, while his authorship of the other works
remained under dispute but suspected for some time. The 1690s continued to be a fruitful decade
for Locke, and he published Some Thoughts Concerning Education, “The Reasonableness of
Christianity,” and papers on money and interest, as well as several lengthy responses to objections
to his works on toleration and Christianity. Locke remained active in both political and intellectual
life in England until his death in 1704.
 Just like the statement “I think, therefore I am” that made Descartes realize that in order for him to
doubt everything, he must exist. He can't assume anything about who or what he really is but he
can safely assume that he exists, otherwise, he would not be thinking about the fact that he exists.
“I sense, therefore I am” is very indistinguishable to the first statement I mentioned above. When
we sense that we’re thinking, then we must realize that we exist.
One example I can give is the lucid dreams. There was a time when I could transfer to places at a
blink of an eye. Knowing that it could not possibly happen to me in reality, I sensed that it was not
real, I was aware that I was Lucid dreaming.
 The difference between Descartes and Ryle’s views about the self is that Descartes considered the
self a substance existing independently of the physical body and its sensory faculties. This idea is
referred to as the “ghost-in-the-machine” concept, and Descartes’ proof of self is not dependent
upon the perceptual data received from outside the self. Rather, his proof of the self is his famous
assertion: “cogito ergo sum” I think therefore I am which means he exists. Locke’s concept of the
self is that it consists of consciousness, and consciousness consists of the perceptions we experience
of the outside world. To know a person, we must observe his/her behavior. To know ourselves, we
must observe our own behavior. The self is known through a person’s behavior presented to the
world.
 Augustine was perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity and certainly the one who
exerted the deepest and most lasting influence. He is a saint of the Catholic Church, and his
authority in theological matters was universally accepted in the Latin Middle Ages and remained,
in the Western Christian tradition, virtually uncontested till the nineteenth century. He was the
Catholic bishop who soon realized that Plato’s Theory of Forms could be the missing link to finally
reconcile the dispute between faith and knowledge. The impact of his views on sin, grace, freedom
and sexuality on Western culture can hardly be overrated.
 Immanuel Kant believed that reason is the final authority of morality. Morality is achieved only
when there is absence of war because of the result of enlightenment.
 Descartes was born in 1596 in La Haye, a small village near Tours, France. The son of an
aristocratic family, Descartes was enrolled at age six in the Jesuit College at La Flèche in Anjou.
Because Descartes had always been somewhat sickly, his teachers allowed him to stay in bed until
noon every day. Descartes attributed his most important ideas to this habit, and said he did his
best thinking when he spent the morning in bed. Despite the religious underpinnings of the
school, it was open to the free study of humanities and science. Descartes immersed himself in a
wide range of subjects, excelling especially in mathematics.
The work that cemented Descartes’ fame was Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). Here
Descartes addresses the concerns and attempted refutations various readers sent to him after
reading the Discourse. The theories in Meditations would change the way people thought about
their minds and bodies and the relationship between the two, but Meditations also contains
arguments that later became known as the “Cartesian Circle” because of the apparent circularity
of their logic. Meditations was followed by Principles of Philosophy (1644), which attempts to
reduce the universe to its mathematical foundation. By the time Principles was widely read in
Europe, Descartes was the toast of continental intellectual circles and was awarded a pension by
the king of France.
But as his fame grew, so did the demands on his time. In 1649 Descartes moved from Holland to
Stockholm, Sweden, at the request of Sweden’s nineteen-year-old Queen Christina, and agreed to
work as her philosophy tutor. Ignoring Descartes’ poor health and his preference for staying in
bed until noon, Queen Christina scheduled her lessons with him for 5:00 a.m. Lack of sleep and
inhospitable living conditions took their toll on Descartes, and, in 1650, he died of pneumonia at
age fifty-four. Despite his attempts to stay on the church’s good side, Descartes’ books were placed
on the Index of Prohibited Books after his death, so for years no Catholic was allowed to read
them.