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September 28,2012

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Immanuel Kant is a German Philosopher, considered by many as the most influential thinker of modern times. He was born in Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) on April 22, 1734. He died on February 12, 1804. He was forbid to teach or write any religious subjects by the late King of Prussia, Frederick William II. Kant obeyed him for 5 years, until the death of his. He published a summary of his religious reviews. Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1781. He differentiated the mode of thinking into analytic and synthetic propositions. Analytic propositions is a one in which the predicate is contained in the subject, as in the statement Black houses are houses. Synthetic propositions meaning are the The house is black. All the propositions that are result from the experience of the world are synthetic. 1996: we constitute the objects of our experience out of our intuitions, locating in these objects in space and time and in causal relationships with other objects. Experience is always the application of the understanding to sensations, and the world itself is the result. Two divisions of Propositions: Empirical- depend entirely on sense perception (derived from experience). A priori- have fundamental validity and are not based on such perception or precede experience. It is a part of built-in structure or the basic rule of the human mind called categories. 1770: the theory of time, space, called notion. Space and time cannot be real for they are not seems to be liked colors and taste; nor yet they are separate to nature. They are just conditions of our sense-knowledge of things, the fact of our consciousness. Kants answer to Locke and to both for rationalists and empiricists. Substance is not inferred from properties. It is the principle of organization according to which experience a thing and its properties to begin with. All our knowledge begins with experience (and is based on sensations), but the basic categories of our experience are not to be learned from it, but instead are brought to experience, as a priori organizing principles. To Humes skepticism; the external world is not inferred from our experience but is essential to the constitution of our experience. Causality is also not derived from our experience but imposed as another of the basic rules of perception. Transcendental ego, the self is the first of all, an activity, or an enormous set of activities, imposing the categories on sensations received and coming to understand the world and its operations are inherent and recognizable in every experience whatsoever, although it is itself never experience. Empirical self it is like everything else in the world, through experience. Self-in-itself, this is a self acts as an agent, the self that deliberates and acts, the self that acts or immoral, responsible or irresponsible, the self that lives at the heart of the practical world. Metaphysics of Morals (1996). Ethical belief that the reason is the final authority for morality. Two types of commands given by reason:

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Hypothetic imperative which dictates a given course of action to reach a specific end. Categorical imperative which is the basis of morality and was stated by Kant: Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general natural law

Critique of Practical Reason (1997), Kant contends that we are both part of the phenomenal world and capable of free moral choice. In which freedom is self-government, the freedom to obey consciously the laws of the universe as revealed by reason. The Critique of Judgment, the beauty is ultimately a symbol of morality. According to Kant, we must ignore any practical motives or inclinations that we have and instead contemplate the object without being distracted by our desires. He believes that the orderliness of beauty and the harmony of nature with our faculties guide us toward an even more profound religious perspective, a sense of the world not limited to knowledge and freedom or even to faith, in the ordinary sense of the term. General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), is his most important contribution in field of scientific study, in which he hypothesized the formation of universe from a spinning nebula, and was later developed independently by Pierre Laplace. Mind and Body Dualism St. Augustines philosophy: human beings are spirits enchained by the lower desires of the body. Augustine argues that our lower desires keep us from God, in whom our spirits can rest and find true fulfillment. By making GOD male, males have been able to use God to justify and maintain their power and authority over women. Feminist philosopher, Elizabeth Spelman claims that mind/body distinction serves mainly to press and denigrate women and minorities. The woman is the body while the male is the mind and mind is supposed to rule the body. For Martin Heidegger, the important task is not to prove the existence of the external world but to understand that each of us exists alongside others in a world already given to us. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) He married with Marie von Tucher and has gifted with two sons, Kant, who became an eminent historian. According to him, Aristotle is the most worthy to e studied among ancients. In Aristotle thoughts, so he believes, it is no longer the motionless, abstract idea, but rather the idea taken as concrete in its working. For him, the natural order is a finite and temporal aspect of the Absolute Mind, which is infinite and permanent. The all-inclusive triad in Hegels philosophy is: (1) Thesis, the Idea; (2) Anti-thesis; Nature; as their names indicate are contradictory or in some way opposed to each other. (3) Synthesis, Mind or Spirit. The synthesis combines into a unity, the positive and affirmative. Everything passes through three stages: (1) Being in itself is a stage at which reality and being in and for itself. (2) Being for itself 2 Introduction to Philosophy

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(3) Being in and for itself Hegels philosophy is the usually considered the culmination of the Speculative Idealism. In his philosophy, the phenomenal world with all of its manifold interrelationships is a manifestation of Infinite Mind realizing itself in finite and temporal processes. The so called physical world is Idea; this is the foundation it rests upon. The far-off end toward which its move is Mind, Spirit, and the Infinite Idea, fully realized in and for itself. Karl Marx has based his philosophy of History on Hegels law of thought called the dialectic. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) Beginning in 1884 of October that lasted 44 years, until something like a paralytic stroke shattered his creative powers at the turn of the year 1888-1889, he lingered, broken until his death in 1990. His friends found him to be charming, sensitive, humorous, fond of gay talk, gifted with vivid imagination, and touchingly considerate. He was referred with whom he lived for a time as the little saint. Published De Laertti Diogenesis Fontibus and other philological studies published in the Rheinische Museum and Literarische Centralblatt in 1886. 1878, Human All Too Human 1886, Beyond Good and Evil was published. 1888, The Wagner Case 1889, The Will Power abandoned, the Revaluation of all Values substituted. Twilight of Idols written and prepared for publication The Anti-Christ (1895) and Ecce Homo written Nietzsche Contra Wagner (1895) and Dithryrambs of Dionysus assembled.

1895, Nietzsche, mentally a child, begins to become paralyzed. In 1990 he died in Weimar. The Nietzschean Hero Go-not knowing where. Bring- not knowing what. The path is long, the way unknown. -Russian Fairy Tale Nietzsche first book is The Birth of Tragedy, analyzed the art of Athenian tragedy as the product of the Greeks deep and non-evasive thinking about the meaning of life in the face of extreme vulnerability. Greek tragedy provided an experiential reinforcement of insights from Greek religion- that we can nonetheless marvel at beauty within life, and that our true existence is not our individual lives but our participation in the drama of life and history. He distinguished two kinds of philosopher: 1. Philosophical laborers- work on inherited traditions of value. They conquer the past; sum it up in new formula. 2. Philosophers proper he argues that real philosophers conquer the future: they create new values and scales of value, and are thereby the prime movers of history. These philosophers are men of the longest foresight, with the responsibility for the destiny of humanity. These sovereign minds are commanders and law giver.

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Utilitarianism is a philosophy in which the maximization of personal happiness would become the ultimate end. For him, fame, and the desire for it, is the mark of the lower nature, of someone capable of being appreciated by the majority of the herd. The self-imposed struggle and sacrifice is not a masochistic pleasure, but a heightened sense of power. The goal is to prove oneself above common fears and aversions, to become master of ones world, including its terror and pain. The point is not to bear suffering in stoic resignation, but to seek it out, for it offers an opportunity to test and display prowess. Suffering elevates humanity. It raises a person above ones self. It is the catalyst that allows human beings to overcome their lower nature, their desire for a comfort and a painless life. Perspectivism He even rejected sometimes the idea of truth suggesting that the ideas we take to be true are just those beliefs, possibly false ones that have to be proven to be useful. He also defended the notion of perspectivism the idea that all our truths are relative to our particular perspectives, which are historically and individually contingent, and which we cannot escape. For him all knowledge is experience, and all experience is individual. Individualism The individual is in the permanent state of isolation. Experience are never truly shared, only their simulacra. The individual is a law unto himself, unpredictable, and unmanageable. Society, then, cannot be composed of individuals. It requires members; for this reason, morality is employed. He contended, was to prevent people from becoming individuals, to make them common. To be individual is immortal. The purpose of state is to cultivate individuals. The strong individual is a product of the struggle with his own isolation. According to him, to be anti-political, is the mark of individuality. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) Schopenhauer is best known for his pessimism and curmudgeonly style. His essay begins with the predicament of the self alone with its struggles and its destiny: What I Am? What shall I do with my life? He is an admirer of Kant, utilized Kants distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal realms to explain the source of human ignorance. As part of the world, we are motivated by our inclinations. We see ourselves as part of a causal system in which things causally related to us, and so we busy ourselves in a multitude of practical projects, plans, and desires. The phenomenal world is a world of illusion. Noumenal reality is the thing-in-itself. Will is neither peculiar to human agent, nor does not each agent have his or her own will. Will is ultimately without a purpose, and therefore it cannot be satisfied. Life is suffering. Suffering is caused by desire, and we can alleviate suffering, as the Buddhists taught, by putting an end to desire. For him, our egoism produces the illusion that other people are separate and opposed beings, in competition for the satisfactions we crave. The result is then that our desires lead us to harm each other. Nevertheless, so long as we are limited to the phenomenological perspective, all of us will continue to assert our will against others, adding to the overall suffering of human experience. CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

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Founded around the turn of his century by Edmund Husserl, phenomenology is essentially a philosophical method, one that focuses on careful inspection and description of phenomena or appearances, defined as any object of conscious experience that is that which we are conscious of. Phenomenon comes from the Greek word meaning appearance For Kant it does not imply a contrast between the appearance and some underlying reality, between the phenomenon and a noumenon or thing-in-itself. Phenomenology is the scientific study of the essential structures of consciousness. Understanding the basic rules of constitutive processes through which consciousness does its work knowing the world. It is the thesis that consciousness is intentional. The phenomenological standpoint is achieved through a series of phenomenological reductions, which eliminates certain aspects of our experience from consideration. Epoche or suspension in which the phenomenologists bracket all questions of truth or reality and simply describes the contents of consciousness. The second reduction eliminates the merely empirical contents of consciousness and focuses on instead on the essential features, the meanings of consciousness. Existentialism Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) Heidegger is a German philosopher whos greatly interested in the problem of being rather than in the problem of human existence. He teaches that in the original disclosure of dasein, the self and the world are disclosed together. A person has a way into the truth of being because he exists. Human is exhibited with care. Care it is in finite temporality, which reaches with death. Death is possibility that happen, all possibilities is evaluated in this light, with one lives with resoluteness, which brings unity and wholeness to the scattered self. Care has threefold structure a. Possibility- humanity gets projected ahead of itself. b. Facticity- a person is not a pure possibility but factical possibility. c. Fallenness- humanity flees from the disclosure of anxiety to lose ones self in absorption with the instrumental world, or to bury ones self in the anonymous impersonal existence of the mass, where no one is responding. Heidegger claims that only by living through the nothingness of the death in anticipation does one attain authentic existence. Death is non-transferable. An individual must die himself alone. Death is not accidental, nor should be analyzed. It belongs to humanitys facticity. Martin Buber THE INTERHUMAN AND THE SOCIAL: Buber emphasize the I-thou relationship rather than the I-it; a relationship of DIALOGUE and MONOLOGUE. In monologue, the person is treated as an object, the influence one has on the other is imposition rather than in dialogue that is unfolding.

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For him genuine dialogue begins when one enters the communication with the other by becoming aware of his/her totality. The other person is received as ones partner. The true turning of a person to the other includes this confirmation. This confirmation is not an approval but an acceptance to be his/her partner. Jean-Paul Satre His philosophy has been considered to be a representative of (atheistic) existentialism. Human person is the desire to be God: the desire to exist as being which has its sufficient ground in itself (en sui causa) - The human person is in the midst of a world that silently stares at him/her. Satre is famous for his dualim: a. en-soi (for itself) - it signifies the permeable and dense, silent and dead. b. pour-soi (for itself) the world only has meaning according to what the person gives to it. Compared to ensoi, a person has no foxed nature. The human person is not what he/she is. - The person, first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world and defines himself afterwards. The person is nothing else but that what he makes of himself. - The person is provided with a supreme opportunity to give meaning to ones life. In the course of giving meaning to ones life, one fills the world with meaning. - Freedom is therefore the very core and the door to authentic existence. Authentic existence is realized only in deeds that are committed alone, in absolute freedom and responsibility and which themselves the character of true creation. - The person is what one has done and is doing, not what he/she dreams, hopes and expects. - On the other hand, the human person who tries to escape obligations and strives to be en-soi, is acting on bad faith (mauvais foi). Karl Jaspers (1883-1968) Jaspers is a Christian intellect in Germany. He resolutely opposed Nazism. Jaspers philosophy places the persons temporal existence in the face of the transcendent God, an absolute imperative. Transcendence relates to us through limit-situation Grenzsituationen. Once involved in limit-situations, a lonely individual has to go through these alone. Meaning the decisions but the one makes his/her own. To live an authentic existence always requires a leap of faith. For him, authentic existence is freedom and God: Freedom alone opens the door to humanitys being what he decides to be rather than being what circumstances choose to make him. In freedom, the person becomes aware of God as never before. Freedom reveals itself as a gift from somewhere beyond itself. Freedom without God only leads as a persons searching for a substitute to God closer to ones self. Usually he, himself tries to be God. Be loyal to owns faith without impugning the faith of others. If openness of communications is to preserve, then we must become concerned with the historically different without becoming untrue to our own historicity.

Gabriel Marcel For Marcel, philosophy has the tension (the essence of drama) and the harmony (that is the essence of music). 6 Introduction to Philosophy

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Marcels Phenomenological method: a. Primary reflection this method looks at the world or at any object as a problem, detached from the self and fragment. This is the foundation of scientific knowledge. The data of primary reflection lie in the public domain and are equally available to any qualified observer. b. Secondary reflection is concrete, individual, heuristic, and open. This reflection is concerned not with object but with presences. It recaptures the unity of original experience. This reflection is the area of mysterious because we enter into the realm of personal. What is needed in secondary reflection is in gathering, a recollection, a pulling together of the scattered fragments of our experience. For Falikowski (2004), existentialism: An attitude or outlook, not a formal system A revolt, a reaction against pure rationality and philosophical system building. The revolt could be from atheist, theist, and apolitical, Marxist views. An emphasis on the subjective experience and uses literary forms and other unorthodox methods. Regards these as central themes: essence versus existence, freedom of choice, individuality and subjective experience, possibility and contingency, authenticity, negation, and personal responsibility.

Contradictions between Having and Being For Erich Fromm, both having and being modes of existence are potentialities of human nature, which our biological urge for survival turns into having mode but that selfishness and laziness are not the only propensities inherent in human beings. The human desire to experience union with others is one of the strongest motivators of human behavior. In order not to feel isolated, we need to find a new unity: with our fellow beings and nature. No Authentic Self, No Identity Fromms (1976:155) proposed new society that should encourage the emergence of a new human being. 1. The willingness to give up all forms of having, in order to fully be 2. Being fully present where one is 3. Trying to reduce greed, hate, and illusions as much as one is capable making the full growth of oneself and ones fellow beings the supreme goal of living 4. Not deceiving others, but also not being deceived by others; one may be called innocent, but not nave. 5. Freedom that is not arbitrariness but the possibility to be oneself, not as a bundle of greedy desires, but as a delicately balanced structure that at any moment is confronted with the alternatives of growth or decay, life or death. 6. Happiness in the process of ever-growing aliveness, whatever the furthest point is that fate permits one to reach, for living as fully as one can is so satisfactory that the concern for what one might not attain has little chance to develop. 7. Joy that comes from giving and sharing, not from hoarding and exploiting 8. Developing ones capacity for love, together with ones capacity for critical, unsentimental thought. 9. Shedding ones narcissism and accepting that tragic limitations inherent in human existence. FILIPINO INDIGENOUS PHILOSOPHY 7 Introduction to Philosophy

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Loob can be characterized as: (1) holistic; and (2) interior. If Filipinos say, masama ang loob they are pertaining to the pain of ones whole being. Hence, Filipinos are known for their sensitivity. From this holistic loob will spring shame, pride or amor propio. Kagandahang-loob, kabutihang loob, kalooban are terms that show sharing of one s self to others. For Mercado (1992), interiority manifests itself in freedom. Loob puts in touch with his fellow beings. The Filipinos generally believes in the innate goodness of the human being. The Filipino looks at himself, as one who feels, as one who wills, as one who thinks, as one who acts; as a total whole as a person conscious of his freedom, proud of his human dignity, and sensitive to the violation of these two. Filipino Philosophy of Time Filipinos remember the past not in linear terms but in terms of consciousness. Linear terms will mean there is a definite beginning and end. Filipinos have the penchant not to stick in clock time because we relate time with meaningful association. They relate stories in the past but not in the historical dates but of the significant events that are attached during that time. Filipinos are also believes in the gulong ng palad and hence looks at life as a series of ups and downs. Meaning, when the so-called wheel of life is on downtrend, he looks to the future with hope because lifes wheel cannot stay down forever. When one weeps, one will surely smile. When today is a bad luck for you then it isnt your day, presumably theres always a right time and turn for us. The Filipinos looks upon every event, fortunate or unfortunate, as a fleeting or transitory. Life may be sorrowful, but precisely because suffering is ultimately salutary, there is hope beyond suffering. Gulong ng Palad approaches karma of the Indians and yin and yang of Chinese thought. A belief in the Filipino that inevitably, the good shall prevail, wherein this could be proven by the times of EDSA II and EDSA III where every Filipinos united to be as one for the sake and goodness of his beloved realm. Bahala Na The Pre-Spanish Filipino people believed in a Supreme Being, Batula or Bathala. In Filipinos personalistic view of the world, they signify that ultimately in life we have to reckon not only with nature and human nature, but also with cosmic or spirits, seen to be the ultimate origin to the problem of evil. Bathala is not an impersonal entity but rather a personal being that keeps the balance in the universe. Bathala is endowed with personality. The Filipino puts his entire trust in this Bathala who has evolved into the Christian God. Bahala na philosophy puts complete trust in the Divine Providence; it contains the element of resignation. Thus, Filipinos accept beforehand whatever the outcome of his problem might be. It is seen as fatalistic sort of leaving everything in God or to chance - such is the uncertainty of life. Superordinate and Subordinate or such called utang na loob is a reciprocating debts of gratitude between coordinates and subordinates holds the group together. It is an act of showing thank you or respect to what the other party benefited to you. It is in Filipinos nature to be helpful. It should not be bounded by utang na loob (indebtedness) but to help to uplift the life nor only of one's own family but of others as well. The Filipino usually shows his gratitude by helping his and his family through his endurance and hardwork as means to economic self-sufficiency.

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Bayanihan is also one of another moving spirit or the optimistic view of Filipino people. Bayanihan is having unity and harmony in Filipino society especially in times of downtrend or calamities.

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