Grade Level: Senior High School/ Grade 12

Subject: Introduction to Philosophy of Human Person

Week: 11

On Freedom

- According to Wikipedia: freedom, generally, is having the ability to act or change without constraint.
Something is "free" if it can change easily and is not constrained in its present state.
- In philosophy and religion, it is associated with having free will and being without undue or unjust
constraints, or enslavement, and is an idea closely related to the concept of liberty. –
-A person has the freedom to do things that will not, in theory or in practice, be prevented by other forces.
- For Cicero: we must be slaves of laws, if we want to be free. Only a person feels free who finds joy to
carry out his/her duty.
- Descartes: You shouldn’t desire anything that you cannot achieve by yourself. You greatest possessions
are a freedom. She isn’t able to make your beautiful, rich, respected, strong and happy in the eyes of the
whole world, but she can only make you free. She doesn’t make you the master of things, but the master of
yourself.
- Thomas Hobbes: The freedom can be rightly defined as a lack of all obstacles to the action, because they
don’t contain in the nature or in the inner qualities of acting person .
- Epicurus: The greatest fruit of restriction your desires is a freedom.
-Immanuel Kant: understanding of the dignity of the individual human being implies that persons
have rights, in other words, that we have an enforceable duty to respect the freedoms of all persons.
- Freedom is not a value but is the ground of values because it allows a person to create and appreciate
values, to pursue the classical values of beauty, truth and goodness. It enables people to use
their creativity so as to bring joy to God and to others, their family, relatives, friends and wider community.
-According to the American moral philosopher Susan Wolf, freedom is the ability to act in accordance with
the True and the Good. According to people such as Saint Augustine and Confucius, this kind of freedom
can reach a point at which it always produces goodness. Thus historically people have struggled not for
abstract freedom for its own sake, but for the freedom to be good and do good .
-Freedom allows people to pursue their interests within the framework of law. It means that people are not
controlled and not part of someone else's plans and purposes.
-On the contrary as long as they do not break the law, a system of general rules that apply to everyone,
they can live where they choose, follow whatever career they wish, buy, sell and trade without restriction,
read and write what they like, espouse whatever beliefs and opinions they hold, associate with whomever
they wish and form clubs, groups, parties and sects without seeking anyone's permission. 

On Death

- Death is simply the stopping of heartbeat and breathing.

- Section 2, paragraph (j) of the Organ Donation Act of 1991 (Republic Act 7170): death is the irreversible
cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions or the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire
brain, including the brain stem.
What happens to the human person after he/she died?
- reincarnation: is the philosophical or religious concept that an aspect of a living being starts a new life in a
different physical body or form after each biological death.
- For Socrates no human person knows whether death may not even turn out to be the greatest blessing for
human being; and yet people fear it as if they knew for a certain that it is the greatest of evil.
- Socrates on death: 1) dreamless sleep 2) passage to another life
Therefore, it is nothing to fear.
-Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy: death is life’s ending
- Martin Heidegger: through death becomes aware of his finitude, and thus, Heidegger chooses human
beings as the only way of understanding existence among creatures.
- Epicurus on death: 1) all consciousness and all sensation ends with death 2) when a man dies, he does
not feel the pain of death because he no longer is and therefore feels nothing 3) fearing none existence
gets in the way of enjoying life
- Thomas Negel on death: 1) Fear of missing out 2) the only real evil of death is dying prematurely
-Jeff Mason: death and its concept are absolutely empty. No picture comes to mind. The concept of death
has a use for the living, while death itself has no use for anything. 
- Mason: Ignoring death leaves us with a false sense of life's permanence and perhaps encourages us to
lose ourselves in the details of daily life. Obsessive contemplation on death, on the other hand, can lead us
away from life. 
-Life is short so enjoy life. Live life to the fullest.