Understanding the Self

Socrates (469—399 B.C.E.)

Socrates is one of the few individuals whom one could say has so-shaped the cultural and intellectual
development of the world that, without him, history would be profoundly different. He is best known
for his association with the Socratic method of question and answer, his claim that he was ignorant (or
aware of his own absence of knowledge), and his claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, for
human beings. He was the inspiration for Plato, the thinker widely held to be the founder of the Western
philosophical tradition. Plato in turn served as the teacher of Aristotle, thus establishing the famous
triad of ancient philosophers: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Unlike other philosophers of his time and
ours, Socrates never wrote anything down but was committed to living simply and to interrogating the
everyday views and popular opinions of those in his home city of Athens. At the age of 70, he was put
to death at the hands of his fellow citizens on charges of impiety and corruption of the youth. His trial,
along with the social and political context in which occurred, has warranted as much treatment from
historians and classicists as his arguments and methods have from philosophers.
This article gives an overview of Socrates: who he was, what he thought, and his purported method. It
is both historical and philosophical. At the same time, it contains reflections on the difficult nature of
knowing anything about a person who never committed any of his ideas to the written word. Much of
what is known about Socrates comes to us from Plato, although Socrates appears in the works of other
ancient writers as well as those who follow Plato in the history of philosophy. This article recognizes
that finding the original Socrates may be impossible, but it attempts to achieve a close approximation.

Plato (427—347 B.C.E.)

Plato is one of the world's best known and most widely read and studied philosophers. He was the
student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, and he wrote in the middle of the fourth century B.C.E.
in ancient Greece. Though influenced primarily by Socrates, to the extent that Socrates is usually the
main character in many of Plato's writings, he was also influenced by Heraclitus, Parmenides, and
the Pythagoreans.
There are varying degrees of controversy over which of Plato's works are authentic, and in what order
they were written, due to their antiquity and the manner of their preservation through time.
Nonetheless, his earliest works are generally regarded as the most reliable of the ancient sources on
Socrates, and the character Socrates that we know through these writings is considered to be one of the
greatest of the ancient philosophers.

Plato's middle to later works, including his most famous work, the Republic, are generally regarded as
providing Plato's own philosophy, where the main character in effect speaks for Plato himself. These
works blend ethics, political philosophy, moral psychology, epistemology, and metaphysics into an
interconnected and systematic philosophy. It is most of all from Plato that we get the theory of Forms,
according to which the world we know through the senses is only an imitation of the pure, eternal, and
unchanging world of the Forms. Plato's works also contain the origins of the familiar complaint that the
arts work by inflaming the passions, and are mere illusions. We also are introduced to the ideal of
"Platonic love:" Plato saw love as motivated by a longing for the highest Form of beauty—The Beautiful
Itself, and love as the motivational power through which the highest of achievements are possible.
Because they tended to distract us into accepting less than our highest potentials, however, Plato
mistrusted and generally advised against physical expressions of love.
Immanuel Kant: Metaphysics
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western
philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound
impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. This article focuses on his
metaphysics and epistemology in one of his most important works, The Critique of Pure Reason. A large
part of Kant’s work addresses the question “What can we know?” The answer, if it can be stated simply,
is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the natural, empirical world. It
is impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible realm of speculative metaphysics.
The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is that the mind plays an active role in
constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind’s access only to the empirical realm of
space and time.
Kant responded to his predecessors by arguing against the Empiricists that the mind is not a blank slate
that is written upon by the empirical world, and by rejecting the Rationalists’ notion that pure, a priori
knowledge of a mind-independent world was possible. Reason itself is structured with forms of
experience and categories that give a phenomenal and logical structure to any possible object of
empirical experience. These categories cannot be circumvented to get at a mind-independent world,
but they are necessary for experience of spatio-temporal objects with their causal behavior and logical
properties. These two theses constitute Kant’s famous transcendental idealism and empirical realism.
Kant’s contributions to ethics have been just as substantial, if not more so, than his work in metaphysics
and epistemology. He is the most important proponent in philosophical history of deontological, or
duty based, ethics. In Kant’s view, the sole feature that gives an action moral worth is not the outcome
that is achieved by the action, but the motive that is behind the action. And the only motive that can
endow an act with moral value, he argues, is one that arises from universal principles discovered by
reason. The categorical imperative is Kant’s famous statement of this duty: “Act only according to that
maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
John Locke (1632—1704)
John Locke was among the most famous philosophers and political theorists of the 17 th century. He is
often regarded as the founder of a school of thought known as British Empiricism, and he made
foundational contributions to modern theories of limited, liberal government. He was also influential
in the areas of theology, religious toleration, and educational theory. In his most important work,
the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke set out to offer an analysis of the human mind
and its acquisition of knowledge. He offered an empiricist theory according to which we acquire ideas
through our experience of the world. The mind is then able to examine, compare, and combine these
ideas in numerous different ways. Knowledge consists of a special kind of relationship between different
ideas. Locke’s emphasis on the philosophical examination of the human mind as a preliminary to the
philosophical investigation of the world and its contents represented a new approach to philosophy,
one which quickly gained a number of converts, especially in Great Britain. In addition to this broader
project, the Essay contains a series of more focused discussions on important, and widely divergent,
philosophical themes. In politics, Locke is best known as a proponent of limited government. He uses
a theory of natural rights to argue that governments have obligations to their citizens, have only limited
powers over their citizens, and can ultimately be overthrown by citizens under certain circumstances.
He also provided powerful arguments in favor of religious toleration. This article attempts to give a
broad overview of all key areas of Locke’s thought.
René Descartes (1596—1650)
René Descartes is often credited with being the “Father of Modern Philosophy.” This title is justified
due both to his break with the traditional Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy prevalent at his time and
to his development and promotion of the new, mechanistic sciences. His fundamental break with
Scholastic philosophy was twofold. First, Descartes thought that the Scholastics’ method was prone to
doubt given their reliance on sensation as the source for all knowledge. Second, he wanted to replace
their final causal model of scientific explanation with the more modern, mechanistic model.
Descartes attempted to address the former issue via his method of doubt. His basic strategy was to
consider false any belief that falls prey to even the slightest doubt. This “hyperbolic doubt” then serves
to clear the way for what Descartes considers to be an unprejudiced search for the truth. This clearing
of his previously held beliefs then puts him at an epistemological ground-zero. From here Descartes sets
out to find something that lies beyond all doubt. He eventually discovers that “I exist” is impossible to
doubt and is, therefore, absolutely certain. It is from this point that Descartes proceeds to
demonstrate God’s existence and that God cannot be a deceiver. This, in turn, serves to fix the certainty
of everything that is clearly and distinctly understood and provides the epistemological foundation
Descartes set out to find.
Once this conclusion is reached, Descartes can proceed to rebuild his system of previously dubious
beliefs on this absolutely certain foundation. These beliefs, which are re-established with absolute
certainty, include the existence of a world of bodies external to the mind, the dualistic distinction of the
immaterial mind from the body, and his mechanistic model of physics based on the clear and distinct
ideas of geometry. This points toward his second, major break with the Scholastic Aristotelian tradition
in that Descartes intended to replace their system based on final causal explanations with his system
based on mechanistic principles. Descartes also applied this mechanistic framework to the operation of
plant, animal and human bodies, sensation and the passions. All of this eventually culminating in a
moral system based on the notion of “generosity.”
The presentation below provides an overview of Descartes’ philosophical thought as it relates to these
various metaphysical, epistemological, religious, moral and scientific issues, covering the wide range of
his published works and correspondence.

David Hume (1711—1776)

“Hume is our Politics, Hume is our Trade, Hume is our Philosophy, Hume is our Religion.” This
statement by nineteenth century philosopher James Hutchison Stirlingreflects the unique position in
intellectual thought held by Scottish philosopher David Hume. Part of Hume’s fame and importance
owes to his boldly skeptical approach to a range of philosophical subjects. In epistemology, he
questioned common notions of personal identity, and argued that there is no permanent “self” that
continues over time. He dismissed standard accounts of causality and argued that our conceptions of
cause-effect relations are grounded in habits of thinking, rather than in the perception of causal forces
in the external world itself. He defended the skeptical position that human reason is inherently
contradictory, and it is only through naturally-instilled beliefs that we can navigate our way through
common life. In the philosophy of religion, he argued that it is unreasonable to believe testimonies of
alleged miraculous events, and he hints, accordingly, that we should reject religions that are founded
on miracle testimonies. Against the common belief of the time that God’s existence could be proven
through a design or causal argument, Hume offered compelling criticisms of standard theistic proofs.
He also advanced theories on the origin of popular religious beliefs, grounding such notions in human
psychology rather than in rational argument or divine revelation. The larger aim of his critique was to
disentangle philosophy from religion and thus allow philosophy to pursue its own ends without rational
over-extension or psychological corruption. In moral theory, against the common view that God plays
an important role in the creation and reinforcement of moral values, he offered one of the first purely
secular moral theories, which grounded morality in the pleasing and useful consequences that result
from our actions. He introduced the term “utility” into our moral vocabulary, and his theory is the
immediate forerunner to the classic utilitarian views of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. He is
famous for the position that we cannot derive ought from is, the view that statements of moral
obligation cannot simply be deduced from statements of fact. Some see Hume as an early proponent of
the emotivist metaethical view that moral judgments principally express our feelings. He also made
important contributions to aesthetic theory with his view that there is a uniform standard of taste within
human nature, in political theory with his critique of social contractarianism, and economic theory with
his anti-mercantilist views. As a philosophical historian, he defended the conservative view that British
governments are best run through a strong monarchy.