Introduction to Philosophy

1:30pm-2:30pm

Chapter 8:
THE HUMAN PERSON ACCORDING TO RENE DESCARTES, IMMANUEL KANT, AND KARL MARX

BRIEF BACKGROUND ON RENE DESCARTES

 French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

 He became acquainted with Isaac Beeckman, principal of a Dordrecht school
 Descartes and Beeckman worked on free fall, catenary, conic sections, and fluid statics
 His Meditations on First Philosophy continues to be a standard text at most universities
 The Cartesian Coordinate Plane was named after him
 Father of the analytical geometry
 One of the key figures in the scientific revolution
 In the Passions of the soul, he asserted that he will write on this topic “as if no one had
written on this matters before”
 In his natural philosophy, there are two major points: First, he rejects the splitting of
corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejects any appeal to find ends –
divine or natural – in explaining natural phenomena.
 Father of modern western philosophy

BASIC PHILOSOPHY OF RENE DESCARTES ON THE HUMAN PERSON

 Man is composed of two substances; body and mind.

 Body and mind exists in two different realms; physical and mental.

BODY MIND

 Being that is extended in length,  Conscious or thinking being which

width, and breath understands, will, sees, and imagines
 Located in time and space  Non-spatial and conscious
 Material and subject to decay  Experiences thoughts, feelings,
 Not conscious desires, and emotions
 Publicly observable  Private and non-observable
 Infinitely divisible  Invisible and immaterial

 Motions in the body are caused by the mind

  Motion produce sensations and emotions
 Body and mind interacts even though they are not in the same nature
 Body and mind are independent of each other

BRIEF BACKGROUND ON IMMANUEL KANT

 He is considered the central figure of modern philosophy

 Kant argued that:
o Fundamental concepts of human mind structure human experience
o Reason is the source of morality
o Aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment
o Space and time are forms of our sensibility
o World as it is “in itself” is unknowable
 Kant regarded the basic categories of human mind as the transcendental “condition of
possibility” for any experience
 He moved philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists

BASIC PHILOSOPHY OF IMMANUEL KANT ON THE HUMAN PERSON

o Human nature is the dignity or intrinsic worth of man which makes man valuable above
all price
o Rationality and free will enable man to regulate his actions and direct his own life and
destiny
o He declared that man should never be used as means to an end and suggested that this
is the ultimate law morality, where all our duties and obligations are derived
o Morality is an aspect of rationality and has to do with our consciousness of rules or
“laws” of behaviour
o The principles of behaviour are derived by the practical reason a priori
o Reason is the final authority for morality
o Ultimate moral principle
“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it
should become a universal law”
”Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of
another, always as an end and never as a means only”
o Man is capable of free and rational actions, therefore, he should treat other persons
with respect and value the rights of equality and justice

BRIEF BACKGROUND ON KARL MARX

 A philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist

  He published numerous books, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto, and
Das Kapital
 His theories about society, economics, and politics–Marxism, holds that human societies
progress through class struggle
 He predicted that capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-
destruction and replacement by a new system: Socialism
 Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history
 Marx is typically cited, with Emile Durkeim and Max Weber, as one of the three principal
architects of modern social science

BASIC PHILOSOPHY OF KARL MARX ON THE HUMAN PERSON

 Human nature as the product of labor

 Man or humanity is its own creator and owes its existence only to himself
 Theory of labor elaborates a concept of human dignity based on the idea that each
human person is an end in itself
 Man is alienated
 Four types from which the worker is alienated:
o The estrangement of the worker from the product of his work
o The estrangement of the worker from the activity of production
o The worker’s alienation from ‘’species-being,’’ or human identity
o The estrangement of man to man
 Every man is valuable and must be treated with respect