Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ (2017)

This.

There may be an interesting thread to pull about whether a western philosophical tendency to focus on an idealised rational individual confronting the world has led to a particular idea of the self. Though I'm not sure whether this has been the dominant view in analytic philosophy post linguistic turn, or whether it has ever been the mainstream in continental philosophy. This would need a lot more work to unpack.

Trying to construct a conflict between Descartes sense of self in the cogito(which as far as I can see amounts to nothing more than 'I exist') and African philosophy seems deeply odd. If Descartes 'sense of self' is mere existence (and I think this is a very odd reading of the cogito), then are we supposed to say that African babies don't exist until they become part of society?

I disagree, Descartes believes that he had proven the existence of "a priori" thought, a place from which thinking could be conducted without doubt - that was the point of his project. That place is also the only reliable locus of personhood in his view. Future thinkers who talked about "embodied" thinking, were conceiving of a personhood that could exist before that a priori consciousness, rather than as a doubtful thing perceived by it.

Interstingly, this "I think therefor I am" has been taken as the most barebone possible way to demonstrate what exist and what does not. However, each word of the sentence makes an assumption that it never tries to demonstrate:

- "I": assumes individuality and that the mind is a local phenomenon.

- "think": assumes cognition and that it's a process of the mind.

- "therefor": assumes causality.

- "am": assumes there is such a thing as existence at our level.

Those are postulates, not demonstrated facts. It's perfectly ok to have those, as long as you declare them as such. However, when you study Descartes, teachers never do so. It's disappointing when the whole point is to teach people to "doubt everything".

There are other philosophies that doubt those postulates. Some assume we are not individuals, but focal points on a collective conscientiousness. Some believe thinking is actually not a creative process, but merely the act of receiving information from another source. Some think we live in a deterministic world, and causality is an illusion our mind uses to make sense of things. Some will say we are not, existence is the symptom of a greater activity like a shadow.

In the end, even something as simple as "cogito ergo sum" can be dissembled to the extreme and debated.

Which is why I enjoy philosophy less and less. It's a never ending source of questions, with very little useful answers for day to day life. It's not practical at all, and my most philosophical friends are also among the most unhappy.

Even antiquity philosophers, despite dispensing practical advises on how to live your life, fall into the trap on not giving any applicable way of reaching their standards.

It's like saying "quit" to a smoker or "eat less" to an obese. True. Practical. Not gonna help.

> If you start doubting everything around you, what is left is your own mind that must exist since it is thinking and doubting.

Actually, what's left are merely thoughts. Cogito ergo sum actually begs the question: in attempting to establish the existence of "I" (a subject) it assumes the existence of "I".

The fallacy-free version is: this is a thought, therefore thoughts exist. From the existence of thoughts, you cannot deduce that a subject is needed unless you additionally assume that thoughts necessarily need a subject. But do they really?

Of course they told about different things. Distinction between self/other is a definition of a person.

But at the same time they spoke about the same thing. If you killed a person, you would be a murderer, and it doesn't matter what definition of a person you use. There are some small differences though, like killing a toddler seems not so bad, if toddler is not a person yet.

I personally believe that toddler is not a person yet. Homo Sapiencs pup becomes a person somewhere between 1 yo and 3 yo. At 1 yo she learns to walk, and gets location independance, she needs some time to learn to be independant, and then at 3 yo she get into psychological crisis, when she learn what the difference between "Me", "Parents", "My desires", "Parents desires", "Rules" and so on. So 3 yo is absolutely the point where she is a person already. While less than 1 yo she is not a person, but external and disconnected physically limb of her parents.

Someone like Descartes is not plumbing the depths of mathematics, or the soul, as a group activity. But anyone since, who reads or is read to about theories that have carried on, becomes that informed person because of exposure to these ideas. The ivory tower is just a prison if it exists without a press.

The problem with this approach is that when different people acquire knowledge of God they often end up with very different results and no way to reconcile them, c.f. the Islamic State.

That we are self contained human beings isn't obvious to me. All of my opinions, thoughts, and actions are a reflection of my surrounding social group.

Is there any reason to think that we have such a choice? Spinoza, a contemporary of Descartes, makes a good case that we don't have such any option at all. In fact, one particular quote I love is a very simple one: "Men are deceived in thinking themselves free, a belief that consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined."

I think this is in some way separate from the metaphysical issue of free will and determinism, since whether our choices are determined by the universe or by us is quite a separate question to the extent to which society influences our choices in general. In my experience, it is absolutely not "still up to us" whether we are influenced by these factors, and a belief that it is up to us is more dangerous since it's delusional. The whole existence of the field of psychology, advertising, politics and propaganda is based on the idea that many things are not up to us - unfortunately we don't get to decide, but we like to think that we do.

Our desires, hopes, fears, opinions etc. are all imported from outside sources to a great extent, and it takes critical thinking to seriously ask about those - critical thinking we very rarely, if ever, apply to ourselves, because it leads to a kind of cognitive dissonance. I have personally suffered through this as I went deeper into political philosophy and saw that many concepts I held so dearly to were simply unsubstantiated, things that I believed due to ideological factors (from which none of us are ever free) and from my friends and relatives (which we may distance ourselves from to some extent only).

The idea we have control over these things without this critical-induced "pain" of having to confront ourselves is farcical.

Chinese.

Better keep those glasses safe.

I don't disagree, but I find it interesting that if you were the last person alive you would spend your time reading the literary artifacts of other people, thereby continuing to grow and define yourself through social action.

In such a situation, your personhood would be sadly diminished.

They might remain a person insofar as they think in language and in other ways exist in reference to a community even if everyone else is dead—in this view, they might also lose their personhood as they become another kind of being after dissociating from human community.

When making such a distinction, people refers to a group en masse, while persons refers to a collection of individuals, emphasizing their actions as individuals as opposed to as a whole.