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Platonic-aristotelian Notion Of Man
CHAPTER ONE -- [Total Page(s) 5]
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CHAPTER ONE
1.1 The concept “Manâ€
Man by his very nature is an inquisitive being. The innate desire, says Aristotle, is both for pragmatic motives and for the sake of knowing. Man wants to know and conquer the realities around him and beyond him. But has not been able, even to unveil the mysteries of his own being “existence.†These various obscurities of man to himself, varied concepts and images of man have been presented according to various ages as below.
1.1.1 The Ancient Notion of Man
The Greek philosophers, interpreted man from ontological perspectives Democritus and other atomists conceived man as wholly composed of atoms and matter. Man is a material reality and possesses characteristics such as singularity, individuality, and concreteness in its being. It is universal and abstract in its qualities.
Plato, the scribe of Socrates on the other hand laid more emphasis on the spiritual aspect of the being man. For him, the soul pre-existed the body before its union with the body. According to him, the soul pre-existed in the world of forms before it came into the world where it got imprisoned in the body, a vessel and from within this prison exercises its activity.
For Aristotle, however, man is the only being that has rationality: he reasons, deliberates, imagines etc and so is the only being, animal that possesses the soul, which is in the form of the body. He writes:
Man is a soul. The soul has two parts: the rational and the irrational. The rational soul has the power of scientific thought. The reason is capable not only of distinguishing between different kinds’s of things, which is the power of analysis. It is able also to understand the relationships of things to each other, able to deliberate and discover as well the guides for human behaviour.1
Irrespective of the fact that, no universal concept has been accepted, even the notion of science that man is a machine. Moreover, that man is a composite of cells predetermined by genes. This Aristotelian solution proves most satisfactory.
1.1.2 The Medieval Notion of Man
This is the period of the confluence of philosophy, and theology but more theologically dominated. The Christians, interpreted man as coming from God. For Augustine, because man is unique and unrepeated, he sees him as single specie. Boethius helped him by completing that concept to differentiate man from other animals such as rats, goats etc. For Him, man is not only an individual person but also a rational being. He said; The person is an individual substance of rational nature.2
For Aquinas, man is a rational subsistent. He is composed of body and soul in his capacity as a “physical substance.â€3 He has his highest capacity in the intellect and this makes him a rational animal or a “subsistent rationale†(a rational subsistent).
Gaurdini in his elegant thought saw man as an autonomous being that decides for him. His notion about man is:
Person means that I, in my being definitively cannot be in habited by any other, but that in relation to me, I am only with myself, I cannot be represented by another, but I am guaranteed to myself.
1.1.3 The Modern Notion of Man
Anthropomorphism rules this period. Here man is seen as man and later on, as a Supreme Being. He is the measure of all things. It is based on the gnoseological phase since it is all about psychological perspectives.
Descartes, the rationalist posited that there are two separated substances: the res cogitans et res extenza – The mind and body or the spiritual and corporeal. He says man cannot be composed of mind and body as in the scholastic sense but rather that the mind makes use of the body, as a pilot, would the Plane. He concluded, therefore, that man is the mind. His idea should not be accepted since the mind needs the body to actualize its activities hence function well.
Freud, thought man, the true “I†to be the subconscious. For in the subconscious, the requirements of the society and the subconscious meet.
CHAPTER ONE -- [Total Page(s) 5]
Page 1 of 5
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