Human Person are Oriented

Toward Their Impending Death

Objectives
Reflect on the meaning of one’s
life
Explain the meaning of one’s
life
Enumerate the projects or goals
one wants to accomplish in life
Activity
List ten things that you want
to do or to be before you die.
Recognize the Meaning
of One’s Life
Socrates
 “Know thyself.”
 “The unexamined life is
not worth living.”
 “I cannot teach anybody
anything. I can only make
them think”
Socrates
Socratic method
- philosophical activity by
means of question and
answer, and we typically
associate with him a method
called the elenchus.
Socrates
Socratic method
- philosophical activity by
means of question an answer,
and we typically associate
with him a method called the
elenchus.
Socrates the Refuter
Elenchus
- is a cross-examination of a
particular position,
proposition, or definition, in
which Socrates tests what his
interlocutor says and refutes
it.
Socrates the Midwife
Maieutic
- aims to bring a person's
latent ideas into clear
consciousness.
Socrates the Constructer
Dialectic
- Simply means “to
converse” or “to discuss”.
Plato
Three arguments on Immortality:
 appeals to cycles and opposites
 appeals to the theory of
recollection/ reminiscence
 appeals to the affinity between
the soul and the forms.
Aristotle
Metaphysics
Actuality (entelecheia) and
Potentiality (dunamis)
Aristotle
2 senses of the term dunamis
Capacity to produce change
(kinesis)
Capacity to be in a
different and more
completed state
Aristotle
Argument on Actuality over
potentiality
1. Notion of final causality – Things
that come to be move toward an end
2. Pair of opposites – anything that is
capable of being is also capable of
not being
Meaning of Life
Arthur Schopenhauer
“Der Mensch kann tun
was er will; er kann aber
nicht wollen was er will.”
“Man can do what he
wills but he cannot will
what he wills.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
The World as Will
 It is a perennial philosophical
reflection that if one looks
deeply enough into oneself,
one will discover not only
one’s own essence, but also
the essence of the universe.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Will - a mindless,
aimless, non-rational
impulse at the foundation
of our instinctual drives,
and at the foundational
being of everything.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Übermensch
- Beyond-man, Overman,
Superman.
- Is the answer to the problem
of Nihilism.
- is the next step in human
evolution.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Will to Power
 It is a doctrine seems to claim
that everything that exists rests
fundamentally on an underlying
basis of “power-centers”, whose
activity and interactions are
explained by a principle that they
pursue the expansion of their
power.
Martin Heidegger
Being and Time
Dasein -
phenomenological analysis
of human existence in
respect to its temporal and
historical character.
Martin Heidegger
Dasein's existence has been
understood as thrown
projection plus falling
Martin Heidegger
Dasein is Being-ahead-of-
itself, oriented towards the
realm of its possibilities, and
is thus incomplete.
Death completes Dasein's
existence.
Martin Heidegger
Dasein cannot experience its
own death as actual, it can
relate towards its own death
as a possibility that is always
before it—always before it
in the sense that Dasein's
own death is inevitable.
Martin Heidegger
Death is thus the “possibility of
the impossibility of any
existence at all”
Martin Heidegger
My death is mine in a radical
sense; it is the moment at
which all my relations to
others disappear.
And it is the idea of death “as
that possibility which is
one's ownmost”