LEARNING SESSION 1 

What Philosophy Is

He said: Who then are the true philosophers?

Those, I said, who are lovers of the vision of truth.
(Plato, Republic vi.5)

PRELECTIO

Describe your understanding of any of the following: self, society, world, morally good acts.
Write only one sentence on each line.

Name: PAMELA G. PALANGAN_  Term: SECOND SEMESTER__

Assigned reading: # 1      Date: January 23, 2021                 Score: ____ / ____

Scoring: perfect - complete, original, thought out; zero - senseless, copied

Own thesis (summary point):

Morally good acts are acts that are freely chosen in consequence of a judgment of conscience,
can be morally evaluated and they are either good or evil.

Three main points:

The object chosen.

The end in view or the intention.
The circumstances of the action.

Example about or illustration of each point:

The object chosen is a good toward which the will deliberately directs itself, the matter of a
human act and express the rational order of good and evil, attested to by conscience.

In contrast to the object, the intention resides in the acting subject because it lies at the voluntary
source of an action and determines it by its end, intention is an element essential to the moral
evaluation of an action.

The circumstances, including the consequences, contribute to increasing or diminishing the

moral goodness or evil of human acts (for example, the amount of a theft).

Conclusion:

Freedom makes man a moral subject, when he acts deliberately, man is, so to speak, the father of
his acts.
POINTS

 Philosophy is an intellectual discipline that is rooted in one’s wonder concerning the

totality of reality, e.g., about experiences of the self, society, and the world.
 Its Greek root words—philein and sophia--mean “to love” and “wisdom,” respectively;
love is the act of willing of what is good for a person while wisdom is the knowledge of what
is important, proper, and reasonable that enables one to make sound judgments and decisions.
 Perennial topics in philosophy include love, freedom, evil, finitude, morality, and
spirituality.
 Philosophy’s distinguishing mark is its way of seeing one’s experience in the light of the
"highest principles"; a rigorous method allows one to understand what is true, do what is
good, and create what is beautiful.

READINGS

... [In] the ancient Greek nation in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. ... there arose a new sort
of attitude of individuals toward their surrounding world ... [T]he Greeks called it philosophy.
Correctly translated, in the original sense, that means nothing other than universal science,
science of the universe, of the all-encompassing unity of all that is ...

... [It] is called ... to serve mankind in a new way.... that of the universal critique of all life and all
life-goals, all cultural products and systems that have already arisen out of the life of man; and
thus it also becomes a critique of mankind itself and of the values which guide it explicitly or
implicitly. Further, it is a praxis whose aim is to elevate mankind through universal scientific
reason, according to norms of truth of all forms, to transform it from the bottom up into a new
humanity made capable of an absolute self-responsibility on the basis of absolute theoretical
insights ...

... [T]he new question of truth arises: not tradition-bound, everyday truth, but an identical truth
which is valid for all ... , a truth-in-itself ...

... [W]hat is most essential to the theoretical attitude of philosophical man is the peculiar
universality of his critical stance, his resolve not to accept unquestioningly any pre-given opinion
or tradition so that he can inquire, in respect to the whole traditionally pre-given universe, after
what is true in itself, an ideality. But this is not only a new cognitive stance ... [T]here soon
results a far-reaching transformation of the whole praxis of human existence, i.e., the whole of
cultural life: henceforth it must receive its norms not from the naïve experience and tradition of
everyday life but from objective truth. Thus ideal truth becomes an absolute value ...

Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” translated by David Carr.
http://webdev.archive.org/stream/HusserltheCrisisOfTheEuropeanSciences
... [P]hilosophy, like art or poetry, rests on a foundation of personal involvement, or to use a
more profoundly meaningful expression, it has its source in a vocation, where the word
“vocation” is taken with all its etymological significance. I think that philosophy, regarded in its
essential finality, has to be considered as a personal response to a call.

... [T]here is not and there cannot be any philosophy worthy of the name without a . . .
philosophical attitude. . . . [A philosophical attitude] could be defined, it seems to me, as a
wonder which tends to become a disquiet . . . [I]t consists above all in not taking reality for
granted. But what can be meant by “reality” here? Certainly not this or that particular
phenomenon whose explanation might be in question. No, what is meant here is reality as a
whole, and it is this ensemble or this totality which is put in question in the philosophical
attitude. We ought perhaps also to take special note here of the mysterious relation between the I
who questions and the world I am questioning. What am I, I who question? Am I within this
world or outside it? ...

I think it would simply be wrong to imagine that there is anything like a dividing wall separating
the philosopher and the non-philosopher. There really never has been such a wall, but today it is
especially difficult to see any line of demarcation, since literature—what everybody reads or is
supposed to be reading—is so full of philosophical thought. This is true not only of the essay and
the novel, but also of the theater and the cinema ...

But I would go much further and assert that every thinking person, especially in our time, has at
least moments where he enjoys an elementary philosophical experience. This experience appears
as a kind of vibration in the presence of those great and mysterious realities which give all
human life its concrete structure: love, death, the birth of an infant, and the like. There is no
doubt in my mind that every personally felt emotion resulting from contact with such realities is
like the embryo of philosophical experience ... [A]lmost every human being, in certain privileged
moments, has experienced this need to be enlightened, to receive an answer to his own
questioning ...

Gabriel Marcel, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond. Northwestern University Press. 1973. ch. 1.
http://gabrielmarcel.blogspot.com

... [C]ognition does not in any way create “reality” (cognition does not create its own content),
but arises . . . thanks to the enormous richness and complexity of reality ... Experience could be
said to be like an original and unceasing call of reality to our cognitive powers. Through this call,
reality at the same time “defines itself” as transcendent in relation to every act of cognition.

Karol Wojtyla, Person and Community, trans. by Theresa Sandok, OSM, pp. 116-7, 124

... This orientation of philosophy was described by Aristotle, who saw philosophy as a science
that attempts to present and explain all problems in the light of the highest principles.

Ibid., pp. 95-96

SUPPLEMENTARY VIDEO:

Watch 12:37-19:00 and 48:00-1:18:00 of this video by the Internationale Akademie fuer
Philosophie im Fuerstentum Liechtenstein: https://youtu.be/23pF-CGFJlg .

REPETITIO

Summarize the discussion we had today in the following manner:

Scoring: perfect - complete, original, thought out; zero - senseless, copied

Introduction:
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Own thesis (summary point):

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Three main points:

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Explanation of each point:

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Conclusion:
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