Personal Identity: Components, Determinism, Freedom, and Life’s Meaning
Components of Personal Identity
Personal identity is constructed from a series of circumstances that affect us, so both socialization and individuation occur together. There are three types of components of our identity:
- Social and cultural components: Sociability transmits to the individual aspects such as language, customs, and so on. We learn these as children.
- Social and political components: Through education, we develop feelings of liking certain beliefs or ideologies. This leads us to join political
Human Needs: Understanding Deficiency and Dependence
Lack and Needs Arising in Humans
For humans, to exist means to participate in the obvious aspects of reality: in appearance, with the body (body level), and the subjective with intimacy (intimate level).
- Humans are lacking and not self-sufficient.
- The lack in humans is the lack of sufficiency to preserve and develop their own life.
- The body and intimacy are components of deficiency.
The Habitat and the Neighbors
The habitat and the neighbors are two ways that give men the resources with which to maintain
Read MoreUnderstanding Ethical Frameworks and Human Diversity
Criteria for Genuine Solutions
Not all solutions are valid. For many centuries, it was thought that women were inferior to men, that children were the property of parents, etc. Slavery has been an accepted cruelty throughout many centuries. Tyrannies have been the most common form of government. These “solutions” have produced injustices and horrors, and have violated human dignity, so we must reject them as bad. We can establish these criteria:
- Values and standards must be compatible with each other
Saint Thomas Aquinas: Key Concepts in Knowledge, Ethics, and Politics
Saint Thomas Aquinas: Theory of Knowledge
1. The Human Intellect Always Starts with Sensory Knowledge
In understanding, as understood, that is, in terms of spirituality, one can know all things, all truth without any limitation. But substantially, it is attached to a body endowed with material respects, that is, understanding, as humans, have as their object itself and given the nature of corporeal things. The link of understanding endowed with body organs imposes that intellectual knowledge starts
Read MoreKarl Marx: Alienation, Ideology, and the Roots of His Thought
Karl Marx: The Three Sources of His Thought
Marx’s thought was shaped by three primary intellectual currents:
- English Political Economy: In his mature years, Marx rigorously studied the works of economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
- German Idealist Philosophy: During his university years and beyond, he engaged with the ideas of philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Feuerbach.
- Utopian Socialism: After leaving Germany, Marx encountered the predominantly French school of utopian socialism,
Richard Hoggart’s Cultural Analysis of the British Working Class
Anthropological and Ethnographic Influences
The fundamental to an anthropological approach was to view culture as that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. It is possible to see Hoggart as viewing the working class he describes in terms of a complex whole, but he doesn’t claim to be using the intellectual tools of anthropology. Another way Hoggart borders on approaches associated with
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