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Augustine
Biography
Philosophical view
Augustine's sense of self is his relation to God, both in his recognition of God's love and his
response to it, achieved through self-presentation, then self-realization. Augustine believed one could not
achieve inner peace without finding God's love.
Augustine’s view of the human person reflects the entire spirit of the medieval world when it
comes to man. Following the ancient view of Plato and infusing it with the newfound doctrine of
Christianity, Augustine agreed that man is of a bifurcated nature. An aspect of man dwells in the world
and is imperfect and continuously yearns to be with the Divine and the other is capable of reaching
immortality.
The body is bound to die on earth and the soul is to anticipate living eternally in a realm of spiritual
bliss in communion with God. This is because the body can only thrive in the imperfect, physical reality
that is the world, whereas the soul can also stay after death in an eternal realm with the all-transcendent
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.
Immanuel Kant
Biography
In 1740, Kant enrolled at the University of Konigsberg as a theology student but was soon
attracted to mathematics and physics. In 1746, his father died, and he was forced to leave the university
to help his family. For a decade, he worked as a private tutor for the wealthy. During this time, he
published several papers dealing with scientific questions exploring the middle ground between
rationalism and empiricism.
In 1755, Immanuel Kant returned to the University of Konigsberg to continue his education. That
same year he received his doctorate of philosophy. For the next 15 years, he worked as a lecturer and
tutor and wrote major works on philosophy. In 1770, he became a full professor at the University of
Konigsberg, teaching metaphysics and logic.
In 1781, Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason, an enormous work and one of the
most important on Western thought. He attempted to explain how reason and experiences interact with
thought and understanding. This revolutionary proposal explained how an individual’s mind organizes
experiences into understanding the way the world works.
Kant focused on ethics, the philosophical study of moral actions. He proposed a moral law called
the “categorical imperative,” stating that morality is derived from rationality and all moral judgments are
rationally supported. What is right is right and what is wrong is wrong; there is no grey area. Human beings
are obligated to follow this imperative unconditionally if they are to claim to be moral.
Though the Critique of Pure Reason received little attention at the time, Kant continued to refine
his theories in a series of essays that comprised the Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgement.
Kant continued to write on philosophy until shortly before his death. In his last years, he became
embittered due to his loss of memory. He died in 1804 at age 80.
Philosophical view
The philosophy of Immanuel Kant can be divided into two major branches. His theoretical
philosophy, which includes metaphysics, is based on the rational understanding of the concept of nature.
The second, his practical philosophy, comprising ethics and political philosophy, is based on the concept
of freedom. Both of these branches have been enormously influential in the subsequent history of
philosophy.
According to Kant, both of these theories are incomplete when it comes to the self. According to
him, we all have an inner and an outer self which together form our consciousness. The inner self is
comprised of our psychological state and our rational intellect. The outer self includes our sense and the
physical world.
Thinking of the “self” as a mere combination of impressions was problematic for Immanuel Kant,
Kant recognizes the veracity of Hume’s account that everything starts with perception and sensation of
impressions. However, Kant thinks that the things that men perceive around them are not just randomly
infused into the human person without an organizing principle that regulates the relationship of all these
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 minds. Kant calls these the apparatuses of the mind.
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. Kant therefore suggests
that it is an actively engaged intelligence in man that synthesizes all knowledge and experience. Thus, the
self is not just what gives one his personality. In addition, it is also the seat of knowledge acquisition for
all human persons.
Paul Churchland
Biography
While working towards his Ph.D., Churchland taught philosophy at the University of Toronto from
1967–1969. After receiving the degree in 1969, he began teaching at the University of Manitoba in
Manitoba, Canada, as Assistant Professor. In 1974, he was promoted to Associate Professor and in 1979,
he became a full professor. After working with the University of Toronto for fifteen years, in 1984, he
accepted the "Valtz Family Endowed Chair" in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego,
California (UCSD,) within the Institute for Neural Computation and its Cognitive Science Faculty. He has
since been working with UCSD.
He remained on the Valtz Family Endowed Chair in Philosophy through 2011. In the years 1986-
1990, he also served as Department Chair at the university.
In February 2017, Churchland became a Professor Emeritus at UCSD and also a member of the
Board of Trustees of the Center for Consciousness Studies of the Philosophy Department, Moscow State
University. He continues to appear as a philosophy faculty member on the UCSD Interdisciplinary Ph.D.
Program in Cognitive Science and with the affiliated faculty of the UCSD Institute for Neural Computation.
Churchland cites as his influence the works of American philosophers, W. V. O. Quine, Thomas
Kuhn, Russell Hanson, Wilfred Sellars, and Austrian-American philosopher, Paul Feyerabend. His areas of
interest are epistemology, perception, philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of
neuroscience, and philosophy of science. He has authored numerous books on philosophy, including,
Matter and Consciousness, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, and Neurophilosophy at Work.
Churcland is a major proponent of eliminative materialism –– the view that because the mind and
brain are identical, we should eliminate the folk-psychological language (i.e., "mind" talk) from our
vocabulary and replace it with a new scientific/neurophysiological language. He introduced the concept
of "eliminative materialism" in his 1979 book, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. He further
refined the idea in is 1981 paper Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes, at the University
of Manitoba.
He, and his wife, Patricia Churchland, also a philosopher, believe that the "folk psychology" that
seeks to explain human behavior in terms of the beliefs and desires of agents is flawed, and that it will be
eventually displaced by completed neuroscience –– a theory that is more substantially integrated within
physical science generally.
He proposes that beliefs are not ontologically real; that is, he maintains that a future, fully
matured neuroscience is likely to have no need for "beliefs", in the same manner that modern science
discarded such notions as legends or witchcraft. He believes that such concepts will be strictly eliminated
as wholly lacking in correspondence to precise objective phenomena, such as activation patterns across
neural networks. He notes that the history of science has seen many posits once considered real entities,
such as phlogiston, caloric, the luminiferous ether, and vital forces, thus eliminated.
In his 1996 book, The Engine of Reason, Churchland hypothesizes that consciousness might be
explained in terms of a recurrent neural network with its hub in the intralaminar nucleus of the thalamus,
and feedback connections to all parts of the cortex. He acknowledges that this proposal will likely be found
in error with regard to the neurological details but states his belief that it is on the right track in its use of
recurrent neural networks to account for consciousness. This has been described, notably, as a
reductionist rather than eliminativist account of consciousness.
In the book Matter and Consciousness, Churchland presents a contemporary overview of the
philosophical issues surrounding the mind and explains the main theories and philosophical positions that
have been proposed to solve them. He introduces the relevance of theoretical and experimental results
in neuroscience and cognitive science and reviews current developments in the cognitive sciences and
offers a clear and accessible account of the connections to the philosophy of mind.
In Plato's Camera, Churchland talks about how the brain constructs a representation of the
universe's timeless categorical and dynamical structure. This process of "taking a picture", which begins
at birth, yields the enduring background conceptual framework with which we interpret our sensory
experience for the rest of our lives.
Philosophical view
Rather than dualism, Churchland holds to materialism, the belief that nothing but matter exists.
When discussing the mind, this means that the physical brain, and not the mind, exists. Adding to this, the
physical brain is where we get our sense of self.
Churchland and his wife are best known for what is called eliminative materialism. They are not
the originators of this theory but are among its most enthusiastic advocates. It is roughly the idea that
there are actually no mental states, no beliefs, desires, feelings. What we call mental states are actually
nothing but physical states. This is not the same as reductive materialism, on which we might say that for
example mental states are the same as physical states (the identity theory), that is, they are also physical
states, or can be explained by physical states (reductionism). To say that water is H2O is not to say there
isn’t any water, but what water is. To say that genetics can be explained by molecular biology isn’t to say
that there’s nothing to be explained but to say how it is to be explained.
Eliminative materialism holds that there is nothing mental states are identical to because they
don’t exist, and there is nothing to be explained, or rather, what is to be explained is human behavior, not
the mental states that supposedly explain human behavior. Human behavior is to be explained by state
of the brain using theories in ways that don’t map on at all to mental state talk.
To put it in a somewhat different way, mental states are part of a folk psychological theory of
human behavior which imputes our conduct to things like beliefs and desires which are mental, but a
scientific explanation of our behavior will not use those terms, but instead will refer to the sort of terms
used in brain science and cognitive psychology, and will offer explanations that do not track explanation
of behavior in terms of belief, desire, and the like.
References:
https://study.com/academy/lesson/immanuel-kants-metaphysics-of-the-self.html
http://www.online-literature.com/saint-augustine/
https://peoplepill.com/people/paul-churchland/
https://www.quora.com/What-is-Paul-Churchlands-contribution-to-philosophy-of-mind