Philosophy and Human Thought: Key Concepts and Thinkers
Elements of Philosophical Thought
Information: Philosophy is concerned with the very intelligence, capabilities, and limits of the whole of reality.
Goals: Knowledge and happiness. Truth and goodness. To achieve these goals, fields have been discovered which have become independent of philosophy. All sciences seek to know the truth, but philosophy asks, how can I distinguish the true from the false?
Mental Operations: It is rational thinking, which seeks to know reality, justify knowledge, and justify action.
Rules, Methods, and Criteria: Philosophy is the rational justification criterion. It wants to substantiate arguments with facts and everything it says. It aims to achieve universally valid and valuable knowledge.
Elements Necessary for Thought
Information: Data or knowledge that we handle and are to be kept in memory or on an auxiliary memory instrument.
Operations: Mental activities that we carry out with information.
Rules, Methods, and Criteria:
- Rule: The standard that should be followed to make correct reasoning.
- Method: The procedure or set of rules to achieve knowledge or a project.
- Criterion: The rule for evaluating the truth or correctness of something.
Goal: The objective to be achieved.
Philosophers of Suspicion
Freud: An Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist who revolutionized the world of psychiatry and the conception of personality. His contribution to the demystification of human rationality was to argue that man does not move only by rational principles, but there is something irrational and even unconscious.
Karl Marx: Also had a huge influence. A German sociologist and economist, he advocated a materialist explanation of history, and the dimension of the human being as a being who transforms, produces, and manufactures reality. Transformations in materials, labor, and economic policies move the world and generate ideas and values.
Friedrich Nietzsche: The most representative thinker of the philosophy of suspicion, he conducted a harsh critique of rational values in all their forms and manifestations. His conception of the human being is part of what is known as irrational vitalism that, against rationalism, argues that the starting point for understanding the human being is his own life. He is a perfect representative of autobiographical philosophy. For Nietzsche, life is ruled by the will to power, the desire or urge to live, but not in any way, but to live with the maximum potential of life possible.
Determinism and Indeterminism
Determinism: Denies the existence of freedom in humans, as many consider it a desire that is based on real ignorance of the internal causes.
- Biological Determinism: States that our actions are the result of genetic inheritance.
- Educational Determinism: We will think and act according to learned patterns.
- Social Determinism: Defends the same idea, but places the causes of behavior in society.
Indeterminism: Affirms human freedom. Inner experience shows us in every situation that we could act in different ways. The philosophical theory that most openly defended indeterminism, making the defense of freedom the motto of its doctrine, was existentialism.
Key Concepts
Thinking: Operating mentally with information to achieve a goal, according to rules, appropriate methods, and criteria.
Morality: What is good and bad for a culture.
Ethics: Universal morality for all world cultures.
Problem: Etymologically means “what has fallen in our way” and prevents progress. It is an obstacle opposed to our interests or projects. In each issue, there is knowledge and ignorance: we know where we are, but we do not know how to proceed.
Logos: Thinking that is expressed in words.
Accident: The whole set of features that may change without the substance of things changing.
Phylogenesis: The process that accounts for the biological evolution of the human species from other species until its consolidation as a separate species.
Humanization: Refers to all those changes that have been added to the life of the human being, from its consolidation as Homo sapiens to the present, and are summarized under the name of culture.
Feeling: Giving meaning to a set of sensations. Sensing, in a way, a background stands out, and acquires a meaning.
Perceptive Concept: A selection of features that enable the recognition of all perceptions of an object as perceptions of the same thing.
Concept: A set of features, aspects, used to identify or classify individuals or objects.
Attention: The ability to select data that we consider relevant to focus perception on it, leaving the other stimuli received in the shadows.
Value: A positive or negative quality, nice or unpleasant, attractive or repulsive, good or bad, that people, things, or actions have, in relation to the subject that perceives it.
Will: The capacity that intelligence has to direct its own behavior.
Project: An advance into the future by which we plan and direct our action.
Human Being: From the evolution of the primate family, the genome is endowed with that of its own species, from which emerges symbolic and social intelligence, which processes information.
Range: The ability to maintain its integrity and perform its own goal-driven actions, in response to information received, the memory contents, and its own evaluation criteria.
Person: A rational individual, considered the master of their acts.
Relativism: Theory that says there are no universal moral standards and values, that they are all derived from culture, situation, or a particular group.
Social Intelligence
Intelligence always develops in a social setting; an isolated intelligence cannot develop. In society, one learns language, culture, and techniques to manage their behavior. We are social beings, and our intelligence is social. From social interaction, emergent phenomena arise that were unforeseen and beyond the mere sum of their parts. Human intelligence reaches its freedom, its autonomy, precisely from this social origin. That is the great paradox of humans: social interaction, the culture that it puts at our disposal, allows us to become independent. Social intelligence has to coordinate individual selfishness and provide good solutions to conflicts.